A WOMAN IN CHINA

My grandmother's curios—Camels and elephants—Dr Morrison—Chinese in Australia—Feared for his virtues—Racial animosity—Great Northern Plain—A city of silence—A land of exile—The Holy Sea—Frost flowers on a birch forest—Chaos at Manchuria and Kharbin—Japanese efficiency—A Peking dust storm.

When I was a little girl and was taken to see my grandmother, she set out for my amusement, to be looked at but not touched by little fingers, various curios brought home by my grandfather from China in the old days when he was a sailor in the Honourable East India Company's service; beautifully carved ivory chessmen, a model of a Chinese lady's foot about three inches long, dainty mother-of-pearl counters made in the likeness of all manner of strange beasts, lacquer boxes and ivory balls; models of palankeens in ivory, and fans that seemed to me, brought up in the somewhat rough-and-ready surroundings of a new country, dreams of loveliness. The impression was made, I felt the fascination of China, the fascination of a thing far beyond me. Like the pretty things, so out of my reach it seemed that I did not even add it to the list of places I intended to visit when I grew up, for even then my great desire was to travel all over the world; I was born with the wander fever in my blood, but unfortunately with small means of satisfying it. As I grew older I used to read every travel book I could get hold of, and later on when I began to live by my pen I got into the habit of gauging my chances of seeing a country by the number of books written about it. China, judged by this standard, fell naturally into the place assigned to it by my grandmother's curios; for from the days of Marco Polo men have gone up and down the land, painfully, sorrowfully, gladly, triumphantly, and at least half of them seem to have put pen to paper to describe what they have seen. Was it likely there would be anything left for me to write about?

Then one bright Sunday morning when the sun was shining, as he does occasionally shine in England, the spirit moved me to go down the Brighton line to spend a day with Parry Truscott, a fellow storyteller. The unkind Fates have seen to it that I live alone, and arriving at Victoria that bright morning I felt amiably disposed and desirous of exchanging ideas with somebody. In the carriage I had chosen were already seated two nicely dressed women, and coming along the platform was a porter with hot-water bottles. The morning was sharp and the opportunity was not to be lost, I turned to them and asked them if they would not like a hot-water bottle. Alas! Alas! Those women towards whom I had felt so friendly evidently did not reciprocate my feelings. In chilly accents calculated to discourage the boldest—and I am not the boldest—they gave me to understand that they required neither the hot-water bottle nor my conversation, so, snubbed, I retired to the other side of the carriage and amused myself with my own thoughts and the sunshine and shadow on the green country through which we were passing. Half the journey was done when I saw, to my astonishment, a sight that is not often seen in the Sussex lanes, a train of camels and elephants marching along. It seemed to me something worth seeing, and entirely forgetting that I had been put in my place earlier in the morning I cried, “Oh, look! Look! Camels and elephants!”

Those two ladies were a credit to the English nation. They bore themselves with the utmost propriety. What they thought of me I can only dimly guess, but they never even raised their eyes from their papers. Of course the train rushed on, the camels and elephants were left behind, and there was nothing to show they had ever been there. Then I regret to state that I lay back and laughed till I cried, and whenever I felt a little better the sight of those two studious women solemnly reading their papers set me off again. When I got out at Hassocks they did not allow themselves to look relieved, that perhaps would have been expressing too much emotion before a stranger who had behaved in so eccentric a fashion, but they literally drew their skirts around them so that they should not touch mine and be contaminated as I passed.

There is always more than one side to a story; how I should love to hear the version of that journey told by those two ladies; doubtless it would not in the faintest degree resemble mine. And yet there really were camels and elephants. And so it occurred to me why not go to a country and try and write about it, although many had written before. If the gods were kind might I not find a story even in China.

Meanwhile one of my brothers had married a sister of Dr Morrison, and I had come into touch with the famous Times correspondent, an Australian like myself, and when he came to England he used to come and see me, and we talked about China. When I met him again after my elephant and camel experience I asked his opinion, would it be worth my while to go to China?

He was quite of opinion it would, more, he and his newly-wedded wife gave me a cordial invitation to stay with them, and the thing was settled. I decided to go to Peking. Accordingly, on the last day of January in the year of Our Lord 1913, I left Charing Cross in a thick fog for the Far East. It is a little thing to do, to get into a train and be whirled eastward. There is nothing wonderful about it and yet—and yet—to me it was the beginning of romance. I was bound across the old world for a land where people had lived as a civilised people for thousands of years before we of the West emerged from barbarism, for a country which the new nation from which I have sprung regards with peculiar interest. Australia has armed herself. Why? Because of China's millions to the north. Australia has voted solid for a white Australia, and rigidly excluded the coloured man. Why? Not because she fears the Kanaka who helped to develop her sugar plantations, but because she fears the yellow man and his tireless energy and his low standard of living.

When I was a child my father, warden of the goldfield where he was stationed, was also, by virtue of his office, protector of the Chinese; and Heaven knows the unfortunate Chinese, industrious, hardworking men of the coolie class from Amoy and Canton, badly needed a protector. Many a time have I seen an unfortunate Chinaman, cut and bleeding, come to my father's house to claim his protection. The larrikins, as we used to call the roughs, had stoned him for no reason that they or anyone else could understand but only because he was a Chinaman. Now I understand what puzzled and shocked me then, and what shocks me still. It is that racial animosity that is so difficult to explain to the home-staying Englishman: that animosity which is aroused because, subconsciously, the white man knows that the yellow man, in lowering the standard of living, will literally take away much of the bread and all chance of butter from the community in which he has a foothold.

Here I was going to see the land whence had come that subservient, patient, hard-working coolie of my childhood. And the wonder of that rush across the old world, the twelve days' railway journey that takes us from the most modern of civilisations to the most ancient—it grew upon me as we crossed the great northern plain—historic ground whereon the great battles of Europe have been fought. The people in the train were dining, supping, playing cards, sleeping, and the cities we passed in the darkness seemed mere clusters of dancing lights, such lights as I have seen after rain on many a hot and steamy night in West Africa. When morning dawned we had passed Berlin and were slowly leaving the packed civilisation behind us. A grey low sky was overhead and there were clumps of fir-trees. Dirty snow was in the hollows, and there were long, straight roads drawn with a ruler as they are in Australia, with little bare trees at regular intervals on either side, and then again dark fir woods and rain everywhere. Soon we had passed the frontier and were in Russia, and I felt I could not rush through without one glimpse of it, so I stayed one little week in Moscow, and I shall always be glad I did, though there, for the first time in my life, I was in a country where my nationality did not count, and it was not a pleasant feeling. But Moscow is the city of a dream. I arrived there at night to streets all covered with a mantle of snow. The many lights shone clear in the keen, cold, windless air and the sleighs drawn by sturdy little horses glided over the white snow as silently as if they had been moving shadows. And when morning came it was snowing. Softly, softly, fell the flakes and the city was a city of silence, white everywhere, and when the sun came out dazzling, sparkling white, only the cupolas of the many churches—Moscow in the heart of holy Russia has sixteen hundred—were golden or bright blue, or dark vivid green, for the snow that hid the brilliant roofs could not lie on their rounded surfaces. Above the cupolas are crosses, and from the crosses hang long chains, and ever and again on the silence rang out the musical clang of some deep-toned bell. But it is the silence that impresses. The bells were but incidental, trifling—the silence is eternal. The snow fell with a hush, there was no rush nor roar nor crash of storm, but every snowflake counted. The little sledges were half buried in it, the drivers in their fur-edged caps and blue coats girt in at the waist with a red sash or silver embroidered band, shook it out of their eyes and out of their great beards and brushed it from their shoulders; in every crevice of the old grey walls of the Kremlin it piled up.

A dream city! A city of silence!! The snow reigned, deadening all sound save the insistent bells that rang to the glory of God, and the cawing of the black and grey crows that were everywhere. What have scavenger crows to do in this beautiful city? They were there flying round the churches, darting down the spotless roads, gathering in little conclaves, raising their raucous voices as if in protest against the all-embracing silence. They were the discordant note that emphasised the harmony.

Cold, was there ever such cold? The air crackled with it. It cut like a knife, for all its clear purity. At every street corner I passed as I drove to the railway station were little piles of fir logs, and little braziers were burning, glowing red spots of brightness where the miserable for a moment might warm their hands.

They say one should leave Moscow in summer to cross the Siberian plain, because then there are the flowers—such flowers—and the green trees, and the sunshine, and you may see the road—the long and sorrowful road—along which for years the exiles have passed. I have heard many complaints about the weariness of the journey in winter. There is nothing to be seen say the grumblers. For these luckless ones I have the sincerest pity. They have missed something goodly. I suppose for most of us life, as it unfolds itself, is a disappointing thing, full of bitterness and—worse still—of unattainable desires, but of one thing I shall always be glad, that I crossed the Siberian plain in the heart of winter, and saw it beneath its mantle of spotless snow. Possibly I may never see it in summer, but its winter beauty is something to be remembered to my dying day.

And yet it is a land of exile. Even in childhood I had read of the sufferings of those who have been sent there; and my conception of the land and the reality before my eyes as I rushed through it in an express train were always starting up in comparison with each other. A land of exile, and yet from the plains of Eastern Russia in the west to the frozen hills round Kharbin in the east it is a lovely land. It is a plain, of course—a plain thousands of miles in extent, and the vastness and the beauty of the snow-clad solitudes cry aloud in praise to the God Who made them. Overhead, far, far away, is the great arch of the deep blue sky, clear, bright, enticing, delightful, with no threat in its translucent depths such as one knows is latent in tropical lands, and below is the snow-clad plain, stretching far as the eye can see, bathed in the brilliant sunshine. From the desert and the mountains in the south it stretches away north to the frozen sea; and from the busy towns of the Baltic in the west, in close touch with modern civilisation, to the busy toiling millions of the East with their own civilisation that comes from a dateless antiquity; and in all those thousands of miles it changes its character but little.

But first there were the Urals. I had looked upon them as mountains all my life; and I saw one evening only some very minor hills, deep in snow, with steep sides covered with a forest of fir and leafless larch, dark against the white background; next morning all trace of them was gone, and we were in Asia. On the station platforms were men and women, Cossacks of the west, Buriats of the centre, Tartars of the east, Christians, Buddhists, Mohammedans; there was little difference in outward appearance, muffled as they were against the cold which was often thirty degrees below freezing-point. The men were in long-skirted coats, and the women in short petticoats and high boots, so that it would have been difficult to tell one from the other save that on their heads the men wore fur caps, ragged, dirty, but still fur, while the women muffled themselves in shawls still dirtier. Though they looked as if they had not given water a thought from the day they were born, I, the daughter of a subtropical land, could forgive them. Who could face water in such a biting atmosphere? I sympathised but I did not desire to go too close when we passengers bundled out for exercise on the station platforms, at least most of us did. Some preferred bridge.

“My God! my God!” said an old military man with unnecessary fervour. “What are the idiots getting out for. I go one no trump, partner. Where is my partner? The donkey 'll be slipping and hurting himself on those slippery steps next and then our four 'll be spoilt,” and he looked round for sympathy.

Someone murmured something about seeing the country, but he shrivelled him with his scorn.

“Seeing the country! This is the eleventh time I've been across and I never even look out if I can help myself. Know better. Oh, here you are, partner,” slightly mollified. “I've gone one no trump, and there are two hearts against you.”

It was a curious thing to me that most of the passengers in that luxuriously equipped train, with every comfort for the asking save fresh air, grumbled so continuously. It seems to be the accepted thing that the traveller who travels luxuriously should grumble. Our old soldier considered himself a much-injured individual when the attendants did not know by instinct when he required lemon and tea and when whisky-and-soda; and the breaking up of a game of auction bridge because the tables were wanted for dinner reduced him to blackest despair. The hordes which through the ages have swept, conquering, westwards probably never complained, their lives were too strenuous, either they fought and died and were at peace, or they fought and conquered, and small discomforts were swallowed up in the joy of victory. It is left to these modern travellers flying eastward at a rate that would have made the old-time nomads think of witchcraft and sorcery to make a fuss about trifles, to complain of the discomforts and hardships of the long journey across the old world.

I knew the country. In the days when I was a little girl studying my map with diligence I should have counted it a joy unspeakable if I had thought that ever I should be crossing Siberia; crossing the great rivers, the Obi, the Yenesei and the Angara that were then as far away and distant to me as the river that Christian crossed to gain high Heaven; that I should watch the sledges travelling in the sunlight along their hard, frozen surfaces, I to whom a small piece of ice on a saucer of water, which by luck we might get if there happened to be an exceptionally cold night in the winter, was a wonder and a delight. I suppose my joy would have' been tempered could I have known how many years must pass over my head before this wonderful thing would happen, for in those days five-and-twenty seemed extraordinarily old, and I was very sure that at thirty life would not be worth living. And I have passed that terrible age limit and have missed most things I have set my heart upon, but still there are moments when life is well worth living. Strange and bitter is the teaching of the years—bitter but kindly, too.

We passed Irkutsk where East and West meet, a great city with church spires and cupolas and buildings overlooking the broad and frozen Angara. We raced along by leafless woods, by barren stretches of spotless snow, and sometimes the swiftly running river was piling up the ice in great slabs and blocks and girding and fretting at its chains, and sometimes it was flowing free for a few miles, the only flowing river in all the long, long journey from the old Russian capital. The water was black, and dark, and cold, looking far colder than the ice. The duck rose, leaving long wakes on the water; then there was a little steam, and then a greater steam in the clear sunlight, but by the time we reached Lake Baikal, the Fortunate Sea, the Holy Sea, the frost had gripped the water again, the lake was a sheet of white, and the afternoon sun shone on hills snow-clad on the eastern side. The hills, hardly worth mentioning when one thinks of the great plain across which we had come, are down to the very ice edge. The great lake, the eighth in the world, is but a cleft in them, and the railway track runs on a ledge cut out of the steep hill-side overhanging its waters, waters that were now smooth and white and hard as marble. Here and there little jetties run out; here and there were boats, useless now, close against them; here and there were piles of wood that would be burned up before the thaw. It had been Siberia for days but Baikal struck the true Siberian note.

Here there were convicts too. Some alterations or repairs were being carried out on the line, and drab-coloured convicts were working at them, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets. Siberia! Siberia of the story-teller! On every little point of vantage stood a soldier with high fur cap, looking out over the men working below him, and they, splitting wood, digging holes in the iron-bound ground, paused in their labours and lifted their faces to the passing train. Did it speak to them of home and culture and love and happiness and freedom, or were they merely the brutal criminal justly punished, and the peasant, poor and simple, here because the Government want workers, and that he cannot pay his taxes is excuse enough.

The sun was brilliant but it was cold, bitter cold, such cold as I had never dreamed of. Men's breath came like solid steam, and the hair on their faces was fringed with white hoar-frost. The earth was so hard frozen that they were building great fires to thaw it before working; and as the darkness fell the flames leapt yellow and red and blue, glowing spots of colour against the whiteness and the night. And with the night came the full moon high in the clear sky, a disc of dazzling silver. The Providence that has guided my wandering footsteps surely gives sometimes with a lavish hand; that which I have sought earnestly with many tears is not for me, but this still moonlight winter's night in Siberia was mine, and all the world that we were rushing past was fairyland. There was in it nothing sordid, nothing unclean, nothing sorrowful.

And it was still fairyland when I awoke in the morning to a brilliant sun shining upon a forest of dainty, delicate, graceful birches with every branch, every little twig, clothed in sparkling white, for the sunbeams were caught and reflected a million times on the frost flowers, and the whole forest was a thing of beauty and wonder that to see once is to remember for a lifetime. It is worth living to have seen it. I have seen great rivers and mountains and been awed by mighty forests, I have watched the thundering surf and listened to the roar of the tornado; but this was something quite different. Awe was not the predominant feeling, but joy—joy that such beauty exists, that I was alive to look upon it. Behind us lay a long, long trail. We in the rushing train represented the onward march of a mighty civilisation, but all around us in the brilliant winter sunshine lay the limitless plains of Siberia, and the birch forest, and the snow, and the frost, and the beauty that is not made with hands, that defies civilisation, that was before civilisation, and we were moved to raise our eyes with the psalmist and cry aloud: “How wonderful are thy works, O Lord!”

But I did not appreciate the beauty of the winter or the moonlight when they roused me at three o'clock in the morning at Manchuria because my luggage had to be examined at the Chinese Customs. The scanty lights on the station, the silver moon in the heaven above lit up the platform as we passengers of the train de luxe made our way to the baggage-room along a path between heaped-up frozen snow and ice, and the difference in temperature between that station platform and the carriages from which the hot air gushed was perhaps one hundred degrees. The reek from those carriages went up to heaven, but the sudden change was cruel.

Our pessimistic old soldier wailed loudest. “My God! My God! this is unbearable!” and I wondered why, because on his way through the world he must have encountered worse things than bitter cold that has only to be borne for a few minutes. Probably that was the reason. If he had had something really hard to bear he would very likely have said nothing about it. The baggage-room was confusion, worse confounded, and nobody seemed to know what was being looked for, opium, or arms or both. This place is the Port Said of the East, and people from all corners of the earth were gathered round their belongings. There were groups of Chinese with women and children and weird bundles; there were the very latest dressing-cases and despatch-boxes from Bond Street and Piccadilly; there was a babel of tongues, Russian and French and German and English and the unknown tongues of Asia. China, China at last, and I was within two days of my destination.

And when the day dawned we had left beautiful Siberia behind, and instead there were flat lands, deserts of stones and dry earth, with but little snow to veil the apparent barrenness, and hills first with scanty trees, but growing more and more barren as we approached Kharbin. It looked desolate, cold, uninviting. The land may be rich, it is I am told, but when I passed there was no outward sign of that richness; the covering of beautiful white was gone, there was only a patch or two of snow here and there in the hollows, and the brilliant sunshine was like gleams of light on steel. At Kharbin they examined our baggage again—why I know not—and again it was chaos, chaos in the bitter cold with the mercury many degrees below freezing-point and screeching demons with a Mongolian type of countenance, muffled in furs and rags that seemed the cast-off clothes of all the nations of the earth, hauled the luggage about, pored over tickets and made entries in books with all the elaborate effort of the unlearned, and finally marked the unhappy boxes with great sprawling figures in tar or some such compound.

“Four roubles, twenty kopecks.” Why I had to pay I know not, that was beyond me, but I was glad to get off so lightly, for had they seen fit to ask me one hundred roubles, I should have been equally helpless. I was thankful to get out of the cold back to my warm and evil-smelling coupÃ©.

And at Ch'ang Ch'un I fairly felt I had crossed half the world, and the oldest old world greeted me with active winter. I did not know then, as I do now, how wonderful a thing is a snowstorm in Northern China. Here the snow was falling, falling. We had left behind us the great spaces of the earth, and come back to agriculture. Through the whirling snowflakes, little low-roofed houses, surrounded with walls of stone with little portholes for guns—the Japanese block-houses, for Japan holds Manchuria by force of arms—alternated with farmhouses, with fences of high yellow millet stalks. The doors were marked with brilliant red paper with inscriptions in Chinese characters upon it—a spot of brightness amidst the prevailing white that lent tone and colour to the picture.

Here it was that the Russians and the sons of Nippon had been at death-grips, and we who were in this train realised why the Eastern nation had won. At Kharbin and at Manchuria, with things managed by Chinese, reigned confusion. That we ever emerged with a scrap of luggage seemed to be more by good luck than good management. From Ch'ang Ch'un to Mukden the little men from the islands in the eastern sea run the railway, and they know what they are about; everything is in order, and everything marches without apparent effort. They bought this land with their blood, and they are holding it now with the sure grip that efficiency gives.

At Mukden a blizzard was raging, and the old Tartar City was veiled in snow. When the snow went, the sunshine was bleak and bright, and everywhere, far as the eye could see, stretched tilled fields, bare of every green thing. Flatter and flatter grew the land. It was half ice and half earth, and the little sledges that were hitherto drawn by ponies were now drawn by men. Once we had left behind the Siberian fir, there was not a green thing to be seen all the way to Peking. The earth of the fields was streaked, dark brown and lighter brown; there were bare trees with their promise for the future; and once we were in China proper, there were the graves—graves solitary, and graves in clusters—just neatly kept little heaps of earth piled up and pointed, something like an ant-hill. The air was clear and sparkling, the outlook was wide. We passed town after town, and where on the Siberian border the names of the stations were in Russian and Chinese, and so equally unintelligible, here in China they were in English and Chinese.

“Do you like China?” I asked a Frenchman who sat opposite me at tiffin.

“No,” said he frankly. “It is too English.” But he laughed when I said that naturally I considered that a distinct point in the Chinaman's favour.

A wind rose, and it was as if the brown earth were literally lifted into the air. Everything was smothered in a dust storm. The atmosphere was heavy as a London fog, a fog that had been dried by some freezing process. The air was full of dry brown particles that shrivelled the skin, and parched the lips, and made me weigh in my mind the respective merits of a soft, moist air, and a clear and sparkling one. I had left London in a yellow fog that veiled the tops of the houses, and lent an air of mystery to the street in the near distance, I arrived at Peking in a typical North China dust storm. We came through the wall, the wall of the Chinese city, that until I had seen the Tartar wall looked grey, and grim, and stern, and solid, and I wondered at the curved tiled roofs, and the low houses, and the great bare spaces that go to make up the city.

The East at last, the Far East! All across the old world I had come; and here on a bitter cold February afternoon, with a wild wind blowing, the train drew up outside the Tartar wall, the wall that Kublai Khan and the Ming Emperors built in the capital city of the civilisation that was old when the Roman legions planted their eagles in the marshes of the Thames. I had reached China, the land of blue skies and of sunshine; the land of desperate poverty and of wonderful wealth; the land of triumph, and of martyrdom, and of mystery. What was it going to hold for me?

CHAPTER II—A CITY OF THE AGES

Chien Men Railway Station—Driver Chow—“Urgent speed in high disdain”—Peking dust storm—Joys of a bath—The glories of Peking—The Imperial City—The Forbidden City—Memorial arches—The observatory—The little Tartar princess—Life in the streets—Street stalls—A mercenary marriage—Courtly gentlemen.

I looked out of the carriage window as the train ran through the Chinese city on its way to the Chien Men railway station, and wondered what the future was going to be like, and I wondered aloud.

“How will I get on?”

Opposite me sat an amusing young gentleman with a ready tongue.

“Oh you'll be all right,” said he. “The Chinese 'll like you because you're fat and o——” and then he checked himself seeing, I suppose, the dawning wrath in my eyes. The Chinese admire fat people and they respect the old, but I had not been accustomed to looking upon myself as old yet, though I had certainly seen more years than he had, and as for fat—well I had fondly hoped my friends looked upon it as a pleasing plumpness. With these chastening remarks sinking into my soul, we rolled into the railway station.

The railways in China, with a few exceptions, have been built by the English or French—mostly by the English—and are managed to a great extent on European lines, so that arriving at the railway station in Peking does not differ very much from arriving at any other great terminus, save for the absence of cabs; but I imagine there must be differences, and that those who run the lines have little difficulties to contend with that would not occur on the London and North Western for example.

“Dear Sir,”—wrote a stationmaster once to the locomotive superintendent—“I have, with many tears, to call your attention to your driver, Chow, who holds urgent speed in high disdain.”

The locomotive superintendent, without any tears, investigated the charge against this driver, Chow. The line was worked on the staff system. No driver could leave a station without giving up the staff he had brought in, and receiving the corresponding one for the next stretch of line. The staff—to follow the directions—is to be handed to the driver by the stationmaster, but the stationmaster on this, and I expect on many other occasions, for the Chinese are past-masters in the art of delegating work to someone else, had handed the staff to a coolie and gone about his pleasure. Now Chow evidently had a grudge against him, for, I fear me, no one believed in his altruism. He insisted on the strict letter of the law and declined to take the staff until it was handed to him by the important man himself, and he kept the whole train waiting, while that worthy was searched for, and hauled out of the particular gambling-house he most affected. When the gentleman appeared, furious and angry, on the platform, Chow calmly lifted up his staff to effect an exchange, and he swore on investigation he had forgotten that the end the stationmaster received had been reposing for all the long wait upon the nearly red-hot boiler! That the stationmaster burnt his fingers is a mild statement of the case.

There was a wild wind blowing when I stepped out of the train and looked around me at the frowning walls, at least I looked as much as I could, for the day was bitterly cold, and most of the ground was in the air. A London fog was nothing to it, that is soft and still and filthy, this was hard and gritty, moving fast and equally filthy, and every one of the passengers was desperately anxious to exchange the bleak railway station for the warmth and comfort and cleanliness to be found between four walls.

I was just as anxious as anybody else, but by the time I had collected my luggage the awful facts were borne in on me that all the people with whom I had made friends on the way across, were rapidly departing, and that there was no one to meet me. Peking was wonderful, I knew it was wonderful; there were such walls as I had never even dreamt of, towering above me, but I was not able to rise above the fact that I was in a strange city, among quaint-looking people who spoke an unknown tongue, and that I did not know where to go. And the Morrisons' invitation had been most cordial. I had rejected all offers of help, because I was so sure someone from their house would be there to meet me, now I seized the last remaining passenger who could speak a little Chinese, and, with his help, got a hand-cart for my gear, drawn by two ragged men, and a rickshaw for myself—this man haulage, this cheapness of human labour, made me realise more quickly than anything else could have done, that I had really arrived in the Eastern world—and after a little debate with myself I started for Dr Morrison's. I had been asked to stay there, and I felt it would be rude to go to the hotel, but as we drove through the streets I thought—as much as the dust, the filthy dust—that the violent gusts of wind were blowing in my face would allow—not of the wonders of this new world upon which I was entering, but of how I should announce myself to these people who apparently were not expecting me. I had such a lot of luggage too!

At last the coolies stopped opposite a door guarded by two stone lions, and as I got out of my rickshaw, entered the porch, and stood outside a little green wicket gate, the doorkeeper stepped out of his room and looked at me. He was clad all in blue cotton and he had an impassive face and just enough English for a doorkeeper.

No, Missie was not at home, he announced calmly. “Master?” I asked frantically, but he shook his head, Master was out too. Here was a dilemma. I would have gone straight to the hotel I had discovered Peking boasted, but I feared they might think it rude. I made him understand I would come in and wait a little, and my luggage, my dilapidated luggage, for Kharbin and Manchuria had been hard on it, was carried into the courtyard of the first Chinese house I had ever seen. But I wasn't thinking of sight-seeing then; I was wondering what I should do. I questioned the No. 1 boy, as I subsequently found he was, a pleasant-faced little man in a long blue coat or dress, whichever you please to call it, and a little round silk cap suppressing his somewhat wild hair. I learned afterwards that some students, enthusiastic for the new regime, had caught him the day before and shorn off his queue with no skilful hands. It was his opinion that Missie was not expecting a guest, but he suggested I should come inside and have-some tea. The thought of tea was distinctly comforting, and so was his attitude. It suggested that unexpected guests were evidently received with hospitality, and dirty as I felt myself to be, I went in and sat down to a meal of tea and cakes.

“I makee room ready chop chop,” announced the boy, and I drank tea and ate cakes, wondering whether I ought not to stop him, and say he had better wait till his mistress came home. And I felt so horribly dirty, too. Then there came in a lady who also looked at me with surprise.

She had come to tea with Mrs Morrison, and she was quite sure Mrs Morrison was expecting no guest. This was awful. I became so desperate that nothing seemed to matter, and I went on eating cake and drinking tea till presently the No. 1 boy came in again, and calmly announced:

“Barf ready.”

And I had just been told that my hostess did not expect me!

I looked at the lady sitting opposite me, I looked at the boy, and I considered my very dirty and dishevelled self. I had not even seen a bath since I left Moscow. I had come through the Peking streets in a Peking dust storm, and I felt a bath was a temptation not to be resisted, wherever that bath was offered; so I arose and followed the boy, and presently Mrs Morrison, coming into her own courtyard, was confronted by a heap of strange luggage, and a boy standing over it with a feather duster, no mere feather duster could have coped with the dirt upon it, but a Chinese servant would attack a hornet's nest with one; it is his badge of office. He looked up at her and remarked, in that friendly and conversational manner with which the Chinese servant makes the wheels of life go smoothly for his Missie when he has her alone.

“One piecey gentleman in barf!”

She came and knocked at the bedroom door when I was doing my hair and feeling much more able to face the world, and made me most cordially welcome, and, when I was fully dressed and back in the drawing-room, Dr Morrison appeared, and said he was glad to see me, and no one mentioned that my arrival had been unexpected, till a week later, when the letter I had written saying by what train I was coming, turned up.

I stayed with Dr Morrison and his pretty young wife for close on a fortnight, and they gave me most kindly hospitality, and not only did I view the wonders of Peking, make some acquaintances and friends, but saw just a little of the peculiarities of Chinese servants. They are good, there is no gainsaying it, but sometimes they did surprise me. Dr Morrison has a secretary, young and slim and clever, who in the early days of our acquaintanceship was wont very kindly to come over and help me in the important matter of fastening up dresses at the back. One evening, being greatly in need of her assistance, I sent across the courtyard to her, and the startled young lady was calmly informed by a bland and smiling boy as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

“One piecey gentleman wanchee in he's bedroom.”

At first I don't think I appreciated Peking. It left me cold, and my heart sank, for I had come to write about it, to gain material perhaps for a novel, and this most certainly is a truth, you cannot write well about a place unless you either love or hate it. Still, I have always had a great distaste for dashing through a country like an American tourist, and so I settled down at the Wagons Lits Hotel, surely the most cosmopolitan hotel in the world.

And then by slow degrees my eyes were opened, and I saw. Blind, blind, how could I have been so blind? It makes me troubled. Have other good things been offered me in life? And have I turned away and missed them? The wonder of what I have seen in Peking never palls, it grows upon me daily.

“Walk about Zion and go round about her... consider her palaces that ye may tell it to the generation following.” So chanted the psalmist, not so much, perhaps, for the sake of future generations, but because her beauty and charm so filled his soul that his lips were forced to song. “Tell the towers thereof, mark ye well her bulwarks.” Far back in the ages, a nation great and civilised on the eastern edge of the plain that stretches half across the world, builded themselves a mighty city. Peking first came into being when we Western nations, who pride ourselves upon our intense civilisation, were but naked savages, hunters and nomads, and she, spoiled and sacked and looted, taking fresh masters, and absorbing them, Chinese and Tartar, Ming and Manchu, has endured even unto the present day. To-day, the spirit of the West is breathing over her and she responds a little, ever so little, and murmurs of change, yet she remains the same at heart as she has been through the ages. How should she change? She is wedded to her past, she can no more be divorced from it than can the morning from the evening.

There is something wonderful and antique about any walled city, but a walled city like Peking stands alone. The very modern railway comes into the Chinese City through an archway in the wall, and the railway station, the hideous modern railway station, lies just outside the great wall of the Tartar City. There are three cities in Peking, indeed for the last few years there have been four—four distinct cities. There is the Imperial City, enclosed in seven miles of pinkish red wall, close on twenty feet high, and in the Imperial City, the very heart of it, behind more pinkish red walls, is the Forbidden City, where dwell the remnant of the Manchu Dynasty, the baby emperor and his guardians, the women, the eunuchs, the attendants that make up such a gathering as waited in bygone days on Darius, King of the Medes, or Ahasuerus, King of Babylon. Here there are spacious courtyards and ancient temples and palaces, and audience halls with yellowish-brown tiled roofs, extensive lakes, where multitudes of wild duck, flying north for the summer, or south for the winter, find a resting-place, watch-towers and walls, and tunnelled gateways through those walls. When through the ages the greatest artists of a nation have been giving their minds to the beautifying of a city, the things of beauty in that city are so numerous that it seems impossible for one mind to grasp them, to realise the wonder and the charm, especially when that charm is exotic and evasive.

The Imperial City, all round the Forbidden City, consists of a network of narrow streets and alleys lined with low buildings with windows of delicate lattice-work, and curved tiled roofs. Here, hidden away in silent peaceful courtyards shaded by gnarled old trees, are temples guarded by shaven priests in faded red robes. Their hangings are torn and faded, the dust lies on their altars, and the scent of the incense is stale in their courts, for the gods are dead; and yet because the dead are never forgotten in China—China that clings to her past—they linger on. Here are shops, low one-storied shops, with fronts richly carved and gilded, streets deep in mud or dust, narrow alley-ways and high walls with mysterious little doors in them leading into secluded houses, and all the clatter and clamour of a Chinese city, laden donkeys, mules and horses, rickshaws from Japan, glass broughams weirdly reflecting the glory of modern London, and blue, tilted Peking carts with studded wheels, such as have been part and parcel of the Imperial City for thousands of years, all the life of the city much as it is outside the pinkish red walls, only here and there are carved pillars and broad causeways that, if the stones could speak, might tell a tale of human woe and Human weariness, of joy and magnificence, that would surpass any told of any city in the world.

And outside the Imperial City, hemming it in, in a great square fourteen miles round, is the Tartar City with splendid walls. Outside that again, forming a sort of suburb, lies to the south the Chinese City with thirteen miles of wall enclosing not only its teeming population, but the great open spaces and parks of the Temple of Heaven and the Temple of Agriculture. But though the Tartar City and the Chinese City are distinct divisions of Peking, walled off from each other, all difference between the people has long ago disappeared. The Tartars conquered the Chinese, and the Chinese, patient, industrious, persistent, drew the Tartars to themselves. But still the walls that divided them endure.

The Tartar City is crossed by broad highways cutting each other at right angles, three run north and south, and three run east and west, they are broad and are usually divided into three parts, the centre part being a good, hard, well-tended roadway, while on either side the soil is loose, and since the streets are thronged, the side ways are churned up in the summer into a slough that requires some daring to cross, and in the winter—the dry, cold rainless winter, the soil is ground into a powdery dust that the faintest breeze raises into the air, and many of the breezes of Northern China are by no means faint. The authorities try to grapple with the evil—at regular intervals are stationed a couple of men with a pail of muddy water, which with a basket-work scoop they distribute lavishly in order to try and keep down the rising dust. But the dust of Peking is a problem beyond a mere pail and scoop. This spattering of water has about as much effect upon it as a thimbleful of water flung on a raging fiery furnace.

Still, in spite of the mud and the dust, the streets are not without charm. They are lined with trees; indeed I think no city of its size was ever better planted. When once one has realised how treeless is the greater part of China, this is rather surprising. For look which way you will from the wall in the summer and autumn, you feel you might be looking down upon a wood instead of a city; the roofs of the single-storied houses are hidden by the greenery, and only here and there peeps out the tiled roof of a temple or hall of audience with the eaves curving upwards, things of beauty against the background of green branches. Curiously enough it is only from the walls that Peking has this aspect. Once in the network of alley-ways it seems as if a wilderness of houses and shops were crowding one on top of the other, as if humanity were crushing out every sign of green life. This is because there is to all things Chinese two sides. There is the life of the streets, mud-begrimed, dusty, seething with humanity, odoriferous, ragged, dirty, patient, hardworking; and there is a hidden life shut away in those networks of narrow alley-ways.

There is many a gateway between two gilded shop fronts, some black Chinese characters on a red background set out the owner's name and titles, and, passing through, you are straightway admitted into courtyard after courtyard, some planted with trees, some with flowering plants in pots—because of the cruel winter all Chinese gardens in the north here are in pots, sometimes with fruit-trees thick with blossom or heavy with fruit, and in the paved courtyards, secluded, retired as a convent, you find the various apartments of a well-arranged Chinese house; there are shady verandas, and dainty lattice-work windows looking out upon miniature landscapes with little hills and streams and graceful bridges crossing the streams. But only a favoured few may see these oases. For the majority Peking must be the wide-open boulevards and narrow hu t'ungs, fronted by low and highly ornamental houses, and shops so close together that there is no more room for a garden or growing green life than there is in Piccadilly. True there are trees in these boulevards, in Morrison Street, in Ha Ta Men Street, in the street of Eternal Repose that cuts them at right angles, but they would be but small things in the mass of buildings were it not for the courtyards of the private houses and temples that are hidden behind.

There are, too, in the streets p'ia lous or memorial arches, generally of three archways with tiled roofs of blue or green or yellow rising in tiers one above the other, put up in memory of some deed the Chinese delight to honour. And what the Chinese think worthy of honour, and what the Westerner delights to honour are generally as far apart, I find, as the Poles. In Ha Ta Men Street, however, there is a p'ia lou all of white marble, put up by the last Manchu Emperor in memory of gallant Baron von Kettler, done to death in the Boxer rising, but there, I am afraid, Chinese appreciation was quickened by European force.

We are apt to think that European influence in China is quite a thing of yesterday, that Baron von Kettler was the first man of note who perished in the inevitable conflict, and yet, when I looked at the eastern wall of the city, I was reminded, with a start, that European influence dates long before the Boxer time, long before the days of the Honourable East India Company, and many must have been the martyrs. There on the eastern wall stands the observatory, and clear-cut against the bright blue sky are astronomical instruments with dragons and strange beasts upon them. They were placed there by the Jesuits in the middle of the seventeenth century, and I know that those priests could not have attained so much influence without a bitter baptism of blood. They stand out as landmarks, those orbs and astrolabes, up and down the wall, even as they have come down through the centuries; monuments, as enduring as any Chinese p'ia lou, of faith and suffering; but the Jesuits were not the first to place astronomical instruments there. The Chinese were not barbarians by any means, though by some curious freak we Westerners have passed them in the race for civilisation, and, as long ago as the days of Kublai Khan, they had an observatory here by the wall. On the ground below, in a tree-shaded courtyard, there is an astrolabe with a beautiful bronze dragon for a stand, the dust-laden air of Peking has polished and preserved it, so that I can see but little difference between it and the newer instruments on the platform above—newer and yet two hundred and fifty years old.

And beyond the observatory in the north-east corner of the city is the Lama Temple, a temple with picturesque, yellowish-brown tiled roofs and spacious courtyards, in which are quaint old gnarled trees, and building after building in that curious state that is part beautiful, part slovenly decay, ruled over by hundreds of shaven, yellow-robed monks among whom, they say, it is not safe for a woman to go by herself. There is the Temple of Confucius, with surely the most peaceful courtyard in the world, and there are other temples, temples with courtyards and weird, twisted coniferous trees in them that are hundreds of years old, pagodas, and bells, and towers, and to each and all is attached many a story.

Overlooking the great causeway that runs along in front of the Forbidden City, west past the south main gate, are two towers, one to the north in the Forbidden City, and one to the south without its walls; and of these two towers they tell a story of tenderness and longing. Hundreds of years ago, when the Tartars were first subject to the Ming Emperors, part of their tribute had to be one of their fairest princesses, who became a member of the Emperor's harem.

The poor little girl's inclinations were not considered, not even now is the desire of a woman considered in China, and the little Tartar girl was bound to suffer for her people. She might or might not please the Emperor, but whether she did or not the position of one who might share the Emperor's bed was so high that she might never again hold communion with her own kin. And then there came one little Tartar princess, who, finding favour with her lord, summoned courage to tell him of her love and longing. But there are some rules that not even the mighty Emperor of China may abrogate, and he could not permit her ever again to mingle with the common herd. One thing only could he do, and that he did. He built the northern tower looking over the causeway, and the southern tower on the other side. On the one tower the poor “lest we forget.” little secondary wife, lonely and weighted by her high estate, might stand so that she could see her people on the other, and, though they were too far apart for caress or spoken word, at least they could see each other and know that all was well.

I do not know whether many of the people who throng the streets from morning to night, and long after night has fallen, ever give a thought to the little Tartar princess. The shops, most of them open to the streets, are full, and on two sides of the main roadways are set up little stalls for the sale of trifles. Curiously enough, and I suppose it denotes poverty and lack of home life, about half these stalls are given up to the cooking and selling of eatables. In Ha Ta Men Street, in Morrison Street, in the street of Eternal Repose, that is as if we should say in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, and the Hay-market, and just outside the gates in the Chinese City, on the path that runs between the canal and the Tartar wall, you may see these same little stalls.

Here is a man who sells tea, keeping his samovar boiling with shovelfuls of little round hard nodules, coal dust made up with damp clay into balls; here is another with a small frying-pan in which he is baking great slabs of wheaten flour cakes, and selling them hot out of the pan; here is another with an earthenware dish full of an appetising-looking stew of meat and vegetables, with a hard-boiled egg or two floating on top; another man has big yellow slabs of cake with great plums in them, another has sticks of apples and all manner of fruits and vegetables done into sweetmeats. And here as it is cooked, alfresco, do the people, the men, for women are seldom seen at the stalls, come and buy, and eat, without other equipment than a basin, a pair of chop sticks or a bone spoon like a ladle supplied by the vendor.

They sell, and make, and mend Chinese footgear at these stalls too; there is a fortune-teller, one who will read your future with a chart covered with hieroglyphics spread out on the bare ground; there is the letter-writer for the unlearned; there are primitive little gaming-tables; and there are cheap, very cheap cigarettes and tobacco of brands unknown in America or Egypt.

I have said there is a lack of home life, and thought, like the arrogant Westerner I am, that the Chinese do not appreciate it, but only the other day I heard a little story that made me think that the son of Han, like everyone else, longs for a home and someone in it he can call his very own.

One day a missionary teacher heard an outcry behind her, and turning, saw a blind woman, unkempt and filthy and whining pitifully. “Oh who will help me? Who will help me?” she cried, shrinking away from the dog that was making dashes at the basket she carried for doles.

The missionary called off her dog, and reassured the woman. The dog would not hurt her. He was only interested in the food in her basket. “Then,” said she, “I went on, because I was in a hurry, but as I went I thought how horrible the woman looked, and that I ought to go back and tell her, 'God is Love.'”

So the missionary stopped and talked religion to that blind beggar, and told her to come up to the Mission Station. She looked after her soul, but also, out of the kindness of her heart, she looked after her body, and when the beggar was established, a woman of means with a whole dollar—two shillings—a week, she realised that God was indeed Love, and became a fervent Christian.

“Clean,” I asked, being of an inquiring turn of mind, and her saviour laughed.

“Perhaps you wouldn't call her clean, but it is a vast improvement on what she was.”

The woman wasn't young, as Chinese count youth in a woman, she wasn't good-looking, she wasn't in any way attractive, but she was a woman of means, and presently her guardian was embarrassed by an offer from a man of dim sight, for the hand and heart of her protÃ©gÃ©e. The missionary was horrified. The woman was married already. The would-be bridegroom, the prospective bride, and all their friends smiled, and seemed to think that since her last alliance wasn't a real marriage it should be no bar. Still the lady was firm, the woman had lived with the man for some years and it was a marriage in her humble opinion. So the disappointed candidates for matrimony went their way. However, a few weeks later the woman came to her guardian with a face wreathed in smiles, “that thing,” she said, she didn't even call him a man, that thing was dead, had died the day before, and there was now no reason why she should not marry again! There was no reason, and within ten days the nuptials were celebrated, and the blind woman went to live with her new husband.

I asked was it a success and the missionary smiled.

“Yes, it is certainly a success, only her husband complains she eats too much.” I said there were always drawbacks when a man married for money!

But as a matter of fact the marriage was a great success. I saw the happy couple afterwards, and the woman looked well-cared for and neat, and her husband helped her up some steps quite as carefully as any man of the West might have done. Truly the Fates were kind to the blind beggar when they put her in the way of that missionary. She is far, far happier probably than the bride of a higher class who goes to a new home, and, henceforward, as long as the older woman lives, is but a servant to her mother-in-law. True the husband had complained his new wife ate too much. But Chinese etiquette does not seem to think it at all the correct thing to praise anything that belongs to one. And for a husband to show affection for his wife, whatever he may feel, is a most extraordinary thing. The other day a woman was working in the courtyard of a house when there came in her husband who had been away for close on six months. Did they rush at one another as Westerners would have done? Not at all. He crossed the courtyard to announce himself to his master, and she went on with her work. Each carefully refrained from looking at the other, because had they looked people might have thought they cared for each other. And it is in the highest degree indelicate for a husband or wife to express affection for each other.

In truth, once my eyes were opened, I soon grew to think that, from the point of view of the sightseer, there are few places in the world to compare with Peking, and the greatest interest lies in the people—the crowded humanity of the streets. Of course I have seen crowded humanity—after London how can any busy city present any novelty—and yet, here in Peking, a new note is struck. Not all at once did I realise it; my mind went groping round asking, what is the difference between these people and those one sees in the streets of London or Paris? They are a different type, but that is nothing, it is only skin deep. What is it then? One thing cannot but strike the new-comer, and that is that they are a peaceable and orderly crowd, more amenable to discipline, or rather they discipline themselves better, than any crowd in the world. Not but that there are police. At every few yards the police of the New Republic, in dusty black bound with yellow in the winter, and in khaki in the summer, with swords strapped to their waists, direct a traffic that is perfectly capable of directing itself; and at night, armed with rifles, mounted bands of them patrol the streets, the most law-abiding streets apparently in the world. In spite of the swarms of tourists, who are more and more pouring into Peking, a foreigner is still a thing to be wondered at, to be followed and stared at; but there is no rudeness, no jostling. He has only to put out his hand to intimate to the following crowd that he wishes a little more space, that their company is a little too odoriferous, and they fall back at once, only to press forward again the next moment. Was ever there such a kindly, friendly nation? And yet—and yet—What is it I find wrong? They are a highly civilised people, from the President who reigns like a dictator, to the humble rickshaw coolie, who guards my dress from the filth of the street. He will hawk, and spit, but he is as courtly a gentleman as one of the bucks of the Prince Regent's Court, who probably did much the same thing. It dawned upon me slowly. These people have achieved that refinement we of the West have been striving for and have not attained as yet. It is well surely to make perfection an aim in life, and yet I feel something has gone from these people in the process of refining. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred they can be trusted to keep order, and the hundredth probably not all the police in the capital could hold them. The very rickshaw coolies, when they fall out, trust to the sweet reasonableness of argument, even though that argument Waste interminable hours. A European, an Englishman or an American probably, comes hectoring down the street—no other word describes his attitude, when it is contrasted with that of the courteous Orientals round him. On the smallest provocation, far too small a provocation, he threatens to kick this coolie, he swings that one out of the way and, instead of being shocked, I am distinctly relieved. Here is an exhibition of force, restrained force, that is welcome as a rude breeze, fresh from the sea or the mountains, is welcome in a heated, scented room. These people, even the poorer people of the streets, are suffering from over-civilisation, from over-refinement. They need a touch of the primitive savage to make the red blood run in their veins. Not but that they can be savage, so savage on occasion, the hundredth occasion when no police could hold them, that their cruelty is such that there is not a man who knows them who would not keep the last cartridge in his revolver to save himself from the refinement of their tender mercies. But I did not make this reflection the first, or even the tenth time, I walked in the streets. It was a thing that grew upon me gradually. By the time I found I was making comparisons, the comparisons were already made and my opinions were formed. I looked at these strange men and women, especially at the small-footed women, and wondered what effect the condemning of fifty per cent of the population to years of torture had had upon the mental growth of this nation, and I raised my eyes to the mighty walls that surrounded the city, and knew that the nation had done wonderful things.

CHAPTER III—THE WALLS AND GATES OF BABYLON

The mud walls of Kublai Khan—Only place for a comfortable promenade—The gardens on the walls—Guarding the city from devils—The dirt of the Chinese—The gates—The camels—In the Chien Men—The patient Chinese women—The joys of living in a walled city—A change in Chinese feeling.

Are they like the walls and gates of Babylon, I wonder, these walls and gates of the capital city of China. I thought so when first I saw them, and the thought remains with me still. Behind such walls as these surely sat Ahasuerus, King of Babylon; behind such walls as these dwelt the thousands of serfs who toiled, and suffered, and died, that he might be a mighty king. They are magnificent, a wonder of the world, and it seemed to me that the men of the nation who built them must glory in them. But all do not. I sat one day at tiffin at a friend's house, and opposite me sat a Chinese doctor, a graduate of Cambridge, who spoke English with the leisurely accent of the cultivated Englishman, and he spoke of these mighty walls.

“If I had my way,” said he, “they should be levelled with the ground. I would not leave one stone upon another.” And I wondered why. They shut out the fresh air, he said, but I wondered, in my own mind, whether he did not feel that they hemmed the people in, caged and held them as it were, in an archaic state of civilisation, that it is best should pass away. They can shut out so little air, and they can only cage and hold those who desire to be so held.

Kublai Khan outlined the greater part of them in mud in the thirteenth century, and then, two hundred years after, came the Ming conquerors who faced the great Tartar's walls with grey Chinese brick, curtailing them a little to the north, and as the Mings left them, so are they to-day when the foreign nations from the West, and that other Asiatic nation from the East, have built their Legations—pledges of peace—beneath them and, armed to the teeth, hold, against the Chinese, the Legation Quarter and a mile of their own wall.

Over fifty feet high are these Tartar walls, at their base they are sixty feet through, at their top they are between forty and fifty feet across, more than a hundred if you measure their breadth at the great buttresses, and they are paved with the grey Chinese bricks that face their sides. As in most Chinese cities, the top of the wall is the only place where a comfortable promenade can be had, and the mile-long strip between the Chien Men, the main gate, and the Ha Ta Men, the south-eastern gate—the strip held by the Legations—is well kept; that is to say, a broad pathway, along which people can walk, is kept smooth and neat and free from the vegetation that flourishes on most of the wall top. This vegetation adds greatly to its charm. The mud of the walls is the rich alluvial deposit of the great plain on which Peking stands, and when it has been well watered by the summer rains, a luxuriant green growth, a regular jungle, forces its way up through the brick pavement. The top of the wall upon a cool autumn day, before the finger of decay has touched this growth, is a truly delightful garden.

It was my great pleasure to walk there, for there were all manner of flowering green shrubs and tall grasses, bound together by blooming morning glory, its cup-shaped flowers blue, and pink, and white, and white streaked with pink; there were even small trees, white poplar and the ailanthus, or tree of heaven, throwing out shady branches that afforded shelter from the rays of the brilliant sun. They are not adequate shelter, though, in a rainstorm. Indeed it is very awkward to be caught in a rainstorm upon the walls out of the range of the rickshaws, as I was more than once, for in the hot weather I could never resist the walls, the only place in Peking where a breath of fresh air is to be found, and, since it is generally hottest before the rain, on several occasions I was caught, returning drenched and dripping. It did not matter as a rule, but once when I was there with a companion a more than ordinary storm caught us. We sheltered under an ailanthus tree, and as the wind was strong, umbrellas were useless. My companion began to get agitated.

“If this goes on,” said he, “I shan't be able to go out to-morrow. I have only one coat.” He had come up from Tientsin for a couple of days. But for me the case was much more serious. I had on a thin white muslin that began to cling round my figure, and I thought anxiously that if it went on much longer I should not be able to go into the hotel that day! However, the rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the sun came out in all his fierceness, and before we reached the hotel I was most unbecomingly rough dried.

Things are ordered on the Legation wall, the pathway between the greenery runs straight as a die, but beyond, on the thirteen miles of wall under Chinese care, the greenery runs riot, and only a narrow pathway meanders between the shrubs and grass, just as a man may walk carelessly from station to station; and sometimes hidden among the greenery, sometimes standing out against it, are here and there great upright slabs of stone, always in pairs, relics of the old fortifications, for surely these are all that remain of the catapults with which of old the Chinese and Tartars defended their mighty city.

The walls stand square, north and south, and east and west, only at the north-west corner does the line slant out of the square a little, for every Chinese knows that is the only sure way to keep devils out of a city, and certainly the capital must be so guarded. Whatever I saw and wondered at, I always came back to the walls, the most wonderful sight of a most wonderful city, and I always found something new to entrance me. The watch-towers, the ramps, the gates, the suggestion of old-world story that met me at every turn. In days not so very long ago these walls were kept by the Manchu bannermen, whose special duty it was to guard them, and no other person was allowed upon them, under pain of death, for exactly the same reason that all the houses in the city are of one story: it was not seemly that any mere commoner should be able to look down upon the Emperor, and no women, even the women of the bannermen, were allowed to set foot there, for it appeared that the God of War, who naturally took an interest in these defences, objected to women.

Now little companies of soldiers take the place of those old-world bannermen. They look out at the life of the city, at their fellows drilling on the great plain beyond, at the muddy canal, that is like a river, making its way across the khaki-coloured plain, that in the summer is one vast crop of kaoliang—one vivid note of green. Wonderful fertility you may see from the walls of the Chinese capital. Looking one feels that the rush of the nations to finance the country is more than justified. Surely here is the truest of wealth. But the soldiers on the walls are children. China does not think much of her soldiers, and the language is full of proverbs about them the reverse of complimentary. “Good iron is not used for nails,” is one of them, “and good men do not become soldiers.” How true that may be I do not know, but these men seemed good enough, only just the babies a fellow-countryman talking of them to me once called them. They know little of their own country, less than nothing of any other. I feel they should not be dressed in shabby khaki like travesties of the men of Western armies, tunics and sandals and bows and arrows would be so much more in keeping with their surroundings. And yet so small are they, like ants at the foot of an oak, that their garb scarcely matters, they but emphasise the vastness of the walls on which they stand; walls builded probably by men differing but little from these soldiers of New China. I photographed a little company one bright day in the early spring—it is hardly necessary to say it was bright, because all days at that season, and indeed at most seasons, are brilliantly, translucently bright. My little company dwelt in a low building made up apparently of lattice-work and paper close to the observatory, and evidently word went round that the wonderful thing had been done, and, for all the charm of the walls, it was not a thing that was often done. I suppose the average tourist does not care to waste his plates on commonplace little soldiers in badly made khaki. When next I appeared with the finished picture all along my route soldiers came and asked courteously, and plainly, for all I knew not one word of their tongue, what the result had been. I showed them, of course, and my following grew as I passed on. They knew those who had been taken, which was lucky, for I certainly could not tell t'other from which' and, when I arrived at their little house, smiling claimants stretched out eager hands. I knew the number I had taken and I had a copy apiece. And very glad I was, too, when they all ranged up and solemnly saluted me, and then they brought me tea in their handleless cups, and I, unwashed though I felt those cups were, drank to our good-fellowship in the excellent Chinese tea that needs neither sugar nor milk to make it palatable.

There were other people, too, on the walls in the early springtime, coolies clearing away the dead growth that had remained over from the past summer. It was so light it seemed hardly worth gathering, and those gleaners first taught me to realise something of the poverty of China, the desperate poverty that dare not waste so much as a handful of dead grass. They gathered the refuse into heaps, tied it to each end of their bamboos, and, slinging it over their shoulders, trudged with it down one of the ramps into the city. Ever and again in my peregrinations, I would come across one of them sitting in the sun, going over his padded coat in the odd moments he could spare from his toil. For the lower-class Chinese understands not the desirability of water, as applied either to himself or his clothes, and, as he certainly never changes those clothes while one shred will hold to another, the moment must arrive, sooner or later, when his discomfort is desperate, and something must be done. He is like the wonks, the great yellow scavenger dogs that haunt the streets of Peking and all Chinese cities, he sits down and scratches himself, and goes through his clothes. At least that was my opinion. A friend of mine who had served for some years in the interior with the great company, the British and American Tobacco Company, that, with the missionaries, shares the honour of doing pioneer work in China, says I am wrong, Chinamen don't mind such a little thing as that.

“Those carters,” said he, “in the interior as it gets colder just pile one garment on over another, and never take anything off, and by February—phew! If you want to smell a tall smell”—I said I didn't, the smells of Peking were quite recondite enough for me—but he paid no attention—“you just go and stand over the k'ang in a room where five or six of them are crowded together.”

And the carters, it seems, are highly respectable, sometimes well-to-do men. I felt I had a lot to learn about the Chinese, these men whose ancestors had built the walls.

Of course there are gates in the walls, nine gates in all in the Tartar City, great archways with iron-studded doors and watch-towers above. I count it one of the assets of my life, that I have stood under those archways, where for centuries has ebbed and flowed the traffic of a Babylonish city, old world still in this twentieth century. They are lighted with electric light now, instead of with pitch-pine torches, but no matter, the grey stones are there.

The gate of a city like Peking is a great affair. Over every archway is a watch-tower, with tiled roofs rising tier above tier, and portholes filled with the painted muzzles of guns. Painted guns in the year of our Lord 1914! So is the past bound up with the present in China! And these are not entirely relics of the past like the catapult stones. In the year 1900, when the Boxers looted the Chinese City, and the Europeans in the Legations north of the Tartar wall trembled for their lives, the looters burned the watch-tower on the Chien Men, all that was burnable of it, and, when peace was restored, the Chinese set to work and built their many-tiered watch-tower, built it in all the glory of red, and green, and blue, and gold, and in the portholes they put the same painted cannon that had been there in past ages, not only to strike terror into the enemy, but also to impress the God of War with an idea of their preparedness. And yet there was hardly any need of sham, for these gateways must have been formidable things to negotiate before the days of heavy artillery, for each is protected by a curtain wall as high and as thick as the main wall, and in them are archways, sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes three ways out, but always there is a great square walled off in front of the gate so that the traffic must pause, and may be stopped before it passes under the main archway into the city. And these archways look down upon a traffic differing but little from that which has passed down through all the ages.

Here come the camels from Mongolia, ragged and dusty, laden with grain, and wool, and fruit, and the camels from the Western Hills, laden with those “black stones” that Marco Polo noted seven hundred years ago, and told his fellow-countrymen they burned for heating purposes in Cambulac. You may see them down by the Ha Ta Men preparing to start out on their long journey, you may see them in the Imperial City, bringing in their wares, but outside the south-western gate, by the watch-tower that guards the corner of the wall, they are to be seen at their best. Here, where the dust is heaped high under the clear blue sky of Northern China, come slowly, in stately fashion, the camels, as they have come for thousands of years. The man who leads them is ragged in the blue of the peasant, his little eyes are keen, and patient, and cunning, and there is a certain stolidity in his demeanour; life can hold but few pleasures for him, one would think, and yet he is human, he cannot go on superior, regardless of outside things, as does his string of beasts of burden. The crenellated walls rise up behind them, the watch-tower with its painted guns frowns down upon them, and the camels, the cord fastened to the tail of the one in front, passing through the nostrils of the one behind, go steadily on. They are like the walls, they are older than the walls, possibly they may outlive the walls; silently, surely, in the soft, heaped-up dust they move; so they came a thousand years ago, two thousand years ago, before the very dawn of history.

These Babylonish gates have for me a never-ending attraction. I look and look at the traffic, and always find something new. One sunny morning I went and sat in the Chien Men, just to watch the never-ending throng that made their way backwards and forwards between the Chinese and the Tartar Cities. I took up my position in the centre of the great square, large as Waterloo Place, enclosed by the curtain wall, and the American Guard looked down upon me and wondered, for they watch the traffic day in and day out, and so long as it is peaceful, they see nothing to remark upon in it. There are three gates in the curtain wall, the one to the south is never opened except for the highest in the land to pass through, but from the east gate the traffic goes from the Tartar to the Chinese City, through the west it comes back again, meeting and passing under the great archway that leads to the Tartar City. And all day long that square is thronged. East and west of the main archway are little temples with the golden-brown roofs of all imperial temples, the Goddess of Mercy is enshrined here, and there are bronze vases and flowering plants, and green trees in artistic pots, all going to make a quiet little resting-place where a man may turn aside for a moment from the rush and roar of the city, burn aromatic incense sticks, and invoke good fortune for the enterprise on which he is engaged. Do the people believe in the Goddess of Mercy, I wonder? About as much as I do, I suspect. The Chinaman, said a Chinese to me once, is the most materialistic of heathens, believing in little that he cannot see, and handle, and explain; but all of us, Eastern or Western, are human, and have the ordinary man's desire for the pitiful, kindly care of some unseen Power. It is only natural. I, too, Westerner as I am, daughter of the newest of nations, burned incense sticks at the shrine of the Goddess of Mercy, and put up a little prayer that the work upon which I was engaged should be successful. Men have prayed here through the centuries. The prayer of so great a multitude must surely reach the Most High, and what matter by what name He is known.

Besides the temples there are little guard-houses for the soldiers in the square; guard-houses with delicate, dainty lattice-work windows, and there are signboards with theatre notices in Chinese on gay red and yellow paper. There are black and yellow uniformed military police, there are grey-coated little soldiers with just a dash of red about their shabby, ill-fitting uniforms, and there are the people passing to and fro intent on their business, the earning of a cash, or of thousands of dollars. The earning of a cash, one would think mostly, looking at many a thing of shreds and patches that passes by. To Western eyes the traffic is archaic, no great motors rush about carrying crowds at once, it consists of rickshaws with one or, at most, a couple of fares, of Peking carts with blue tilts and a sturdy pony or a handsome mule in the shafts, and the driver seated cross-legged in fronts of longer carts with wheels studded, as the Peking carts are, and loaded with timber, with lime, and all manner of merchandise, and drawn sometimes by three or four underfed little horses, but mostly by a horse or mule in the shafts and a mule or a donkey so far in front one wonders he can exert any influence on the traction at all. The rickshaw coolies clang their bells, men on bicycles toot their horns, every donkey, and most horses and mules, have rings of bells round their necks, and everyone shouts at the top of his voice, while forty feet up on the wall, a foreign soldier, one of the Americans who hold the Chien Men, is practising all his bugle calls.

“Turn out, turn out Mess, mess,” proclaims the bugle shrilly above. “Clang, clang, clang,” ring the rickshaw bells. A postman in shabby blue, with bands of dirty white, passes on his bicycle and blows his horn, herald of the ways of the West. A brougham comes along with sides all of glass, such as the Chinaman loves. In it is a man in a modern tall hat, a little out-of-date; on the box, are two men in grey silk, orthodox Chinese costume, queue and all, but alas for picturesqueness they have crowned their heads with hideous tourist caps, the mafoo behind on the step, hanging on to the roof by a strap, has on a very ordinary wideawake, his business it is to jump down and lead the horses round a corner—no self-respecting Chinese horse can negotiate a corner without assistance—and the finishing touch is put by the coachman, also in a tourist cap, who clangs a bell with as much fervour as a rickshaw coolie. Before this carriage trot outriders. “Lend light, lend light,” they cry, which is the Eastern way of saying “By your leave, by your leave. My master a great man comes.” After the coach come more riders. It may be a modern carriage in which lie rides, but the important man in China can no more move without his outriders and his following, than could one of the kings or nobles of Nineveh or Babylon.

More laden carts come in from the west, and the policeman, in dusty black and yellow, directs them, though they really need no directing. The average Chinese mind is essentially orderly, and never dreams of questioning rules. Is there not a stone exactly in the middle of the road under the great archway, and does not every man know that those going east must go one way, and those going west the other? What need for direction? An old-fashioned fat Chinese with shaven head and pigtail and sleeveless black satin waistcoat over his long blue coat comes along. He half-smothers a small donkey with a ring of jingling bells round its neck, a coolie follows him in rags, but that does not matter, spring is in the land, and he is nearly hidden by the lilac bloom he carries, another comes along with a basket strapped on his back and a scoop in his hand, he is collecting the droppings of the animals, either for manure or to make argol for fuel, a stream of rickshaws swerve out of the way of a blind man, ragged, bent, old, who with lute in one hand and staff in the other taps his way along.

“Hsien Sheng, before born,” he is addressed by the coolies directing him, for his affliction brings him outward respect from these courteous people.

In the rickshaws are all manner of people: Manchu women with high head-dresses in the form of a cross, highly painted faces and the gayest of long silk coats, shy Chinese women, who from their earliest childhood have been taught that a woman must efface herself. Their hair is decked with flowers, and dressed low on the nape of their necks, their coats are of soberer colours, and their feet are pitifully maimed. “For every small foot,” says a Chinese proverb, “there is a jar full of tears.” The years of agony every one of those women must have lived through, but their faces are impassive, smiling with a surface smile that gives no indication of the feelings behind.

The Chien Men, because it opens only from the Tartar to the Chinese City, is not closed, but eight o'clock sees all the gates in the twenty-three miles of outer wall closed for the night, and very awkward it sometimes is for the foreigner, who is not used to these restrictions, for neither threats nor bribes will open those gates once they are shut.

I remember on one occasion a young fellow, who had lingered too long among the delights of the city, found himself, one pleasant warm summer evening, just outside the Shun Chih Men as the gates of the Chinese City were closing. He wanted to get back to his cottage at the race-course but the guardians of the gate were obdurate. “It was an order and the gates were closed till daylight next morning.” He could not climb the walls, and even if he could, the two ponies he had with him could not. He probably used up all the bad language at his command, if I know anything about him, and he grew more furious when he recollected he had guests coming to dinner. Then he began to think, and remembered that the railway came through the wall. Inspection showed him that there were gates across it, also fast closed, and here he got his second wind, and quite a fresh assortment of bad language, which was checked by the whistle of an approaching train. Then a bright idea occurred to him. Where a train could go, a pony could go, and he stood close to the line in the darkness, instructed his mafoo to keep close beside him, and the moment the train passed, got on to the line and followed in its wake, regardless of the protests of raging gatekeepers. He got through the gate triumphantly, but then, alas, his troubles began, for the railway line had not been built with a view to taking ponies through the wall. There were rocks and barbed wire, there were fences, and there were mud holes, and his guests are wont to relate how as they were sitting down to table under the hospitable guidance of his No. 1 boy, there arrived on the scene a man, mud to the eyes—it was summertime when there is plenty of mud in the country round Peking—and silent, because no profanity of which he was capable could possibly have done justice to his feelings. Such are some of the joys of living in a Babylonish city.

When I had sat an hour in the gate I rose to go, and the rickshaw coolie and I disagreed as to the fare. A rickshaw coolie and I never did agree as to the fare. Gladly would I pay double to avoid a row, but the coolie, taken from the Legation Quarter of Peking where the tourists spoil him, would complain and try to extort more if you offered him a dollar for a ten-cent ride, therefore the thing was not to be avoided. I did not see my way to getting clear, and a crowd began to gather. Then there came along a Chinese, a well-dressed young man.

His long petticoats of silk were slit at the sides, he had on a silken jacket and a little round cap. He wore no queue, because few of the men of his generation, and of his rank wear a queue, and he spoke English as good as my own.

“What is the matter?” I told him. “How much did you pay him?”

“Forty cents.”

“It is too much,” said he, and he called a policeman, and that coolie was driven off with contumely. But it marked a wonderful stride in Chinese feeling that a Chinese should come to the assistance of a foreigner in distress. Not very long ago he would have passed on the other side, scorning the woman of the outer barbarians, glad in his heart that she should be “done” even by one so low in the social scale as a rickshaw coolie, a serf of the great city these ancient walls enclose.

CHAPTER IV—THE LEGATION QUARTER OF PEKING

A forgotten tragedy—The troops—“Lest We Forget”—The fortified wall—“No low-class Chinese”—The last thing in the way of insults—A respecter of power—Racing stables—Pekin s'amuse—Chinese gentleman on a waltz—Musical comedy—The French of the Far East—Chances of an outbreak—No wounded.

At Canton a few years since,” wrote Sir George Staunton, recording the visit of the first British Ambassador to the Emperor of China in 1798, “an accident happened which had well-nigh put a stop to our foreign trade. Evils of every kind fraught with this tendency are to be apprehended, and ought to be particularly guarded against, especially by a commercial nation. On some day by rejoicing in firing the guns of one of those vessels which navigates between the British settlements in India and Canton, but not in the employment of the East India Company, two Chinese, in a boat lying near the vessel, were accidentally killed by the gunner. The crime of murder is never pardoned in China. The Viceroy of the Province, fired with indignation at the supposed atrocity, demanded the perpetrator of the deed, or the person of him who ordered it. The event was stated in remonstrance to be purely accidental but the Viceroy, supposing it to have been done from a wicked disposition, still persisted in his demand, and to assure himself of that object, he seized one of the principal supercargoes. The other factories being alarmed, united themselves with the English as in a common cause, and seemed disposed to resist the intentions of the Viceroy who on his part arranged his troops on the banks of the river to force a compliance. It was at last deemed expedient on principles of policy, to give up the gunner with scarce a glimmering of hope that his life would be spared.”

Later on in a casual footnote he records that their worst fears had been realised, and the unfortunate gunner, given up, let us hope, not so much from motives of policy as to save the supercargo, had been done to death.

That incident, to my mind, explains the Legation Quarter of Peking to-day. Of course the Legation, in its present form, dates only from the Boxer rising, but the germ of it was there when the merchants of the assembled nations felt themselves compelled to sacrifice the careless gunner “from motives of policy.” One hundred and twenty years ago the Western nations were only a stage removed from the barbaric civilisation the Chinese had reached two or three thousand years before, but still they were moving onward, and they felt they must combine if they would trade with this rich land, and yet protect their subjects and their goods. And so they did combine, and there arose that curious state of affairs between the foreigners and the people of the land that has held for many years, that holds in no other land, and that has crystallised in the Legation Quarter of Peking.

Suppose in London all the great nations of the earth took a strip of the town, extending say from Marble Arch to Hyde Park Corner, and from Park Lane to Bond Street, held it and fortified it heavily, barring out the inhabitants, not wholly, but by certain regulations that prevented them having the upper hand. The thing is unthinkable, yet that is exactly what has happened in Peking. Against the Tartar wall, from the Chien Men to the Ha Ta Men, the nations have taken a parallelogram of ground all but a mile square, they have heavily fortified it, on three sides they have cleared a broad glacis on which no houses may be built, and they have there a body of troops with which they could overawe if not hold all the town.

No man knows exactly how many men the Japanese have, but supposing they are on a par with the other nations, there are at least two thousand five hundred men armed to the teeth and kept at the highest pitch of perfection in the Legation Quarter. Living there is like living in an armed camp. You cannot go in or out without passing forts or guns, in the streets you meet ammunition wagons, baggage wagons, Red Cross wagons, and at every turn are soldiers, soldiers of all the European nations that have any standing at all, soldiers from America, soldiers from Japan; they are doing sentry-go at the various Legations, they are drilling, they are marching, they are shooting all day long. In one corner of the British Legation they keep untouched a piece of the old shot-torn wall of 1900 and painted on it, in big black letters, is the legend, “Lest We Forget,” a reminder always, if the nations needed a reminder, of the days of 1900, of the terrible days that may be repeated any time this peace-loving nation drifts into an anti-foreign outbreak. I was going to write it is almost insulting; but it is insulting, and this armed Legation Quarter must be in truth cruelly galling to the better-class, educated Chinese. They must long to oust these arrogant men from the West and their neighbour from the East, who thus lord it over them in the very heart of their own city. Even the wall, the great Tartar wall built first by Kublai Khan, and finished by the Ming conquerors, comes under foreign domination from the Ha Ta Men to the Chien Men. The watch-tower over the Ha Ta Men is still in the hands of the Chinese, and like most things Chinese is all out of repair. The red lacquer is cracked, the gold is faded, the grass grows on the tiled roofs, in the winter dried-up and faded, in the summer lush and green, and for all the Chinese soldiers hold it, it is desolate and a thing of the past But a hundred yards or so to the west, is the German post. Always are armed men there with the eagle on their helmets, always an armed sentry marches up and down, keeping watch and ward. No great need for them to hold the Ha Ta Men, their guns dominate it, and below in the town the French hold carefully the fortified eastern side of the Legation Quarter. The centre of that strip of wall, held by the Japanese, is marked by an iron fence called, I am told, a “traverse.” There is a gate in it, and across the path to that gate, so that it may not be so easily got through, is built up a little wall of brick the height of a man. In the summertime the grass grows on it green and fresh, and all the iron bars of that fence and gate are wreathed in morning glory. The Japanese are not so much in evidence as the efficient Germans or the smart Americans, but I am told they are more than keen, and would gladly and effectually hold the whole wall would the other nations allow them. At the Chien Men, the western end of the mile-long strip of wall are the Americans, tall, lean, smart, capable men in khaki, with slouch hats turned up at the sides, clean-shaven faces and the sound in their voices that makes of their English another tongue. In the troubles of 1912, when fires were breaking out all over the city, and every foreigner fled for safety to his Legation, Uncle Sam, guarding the western end of the wall overlooking those Legations, seized the beautiful new watch-tower on the Chien Men, his soldiers established themselves there, and they hold it still. It dominates their Legation they say with reason, for their own safety they must hold it, and the Chinese acquiesce, not because they like it, but because they must. Periodically representations come in, all is quiet now, the Americans may as well give up the main gate, or rather watch-tower, for they do not hold the main gate, only the tower that overlooks it. But the answer is always the same, it overlooks their Legation, they must hold it. They have a wireless telegraph post there and a block-house, and the regulations for the sentry, couched in cold, calm, official language, are an insult to the friendly nation that gives them hospitality, or would be so, if that nation had not shown itself incapable of controlling the passions of its own aroused people. The sentry clad in khaki in summer, in blue in winter, marching up and down by the watch-tower, magnificent in its gorgeous Eastern decorations of blue, and green, and red, and barbaric gold, must report at once anything unusual taking place in the gate below, any large gathering of Chinese, any unusual commotion, but above all upon that wall, that wall that belongs to them and is the wall of their capital city, he must not allow, without a permit, any Chinese. The wording of the order runs, “No low-class Chinese,” but the definition of low class is left to the discretion of the soldier, and he is not likely to risk a reproof from those in authority over him by being too lax. With my own eyes have I seen a Chinese, well-dressed in European clothes, turned back by the sentry from the ramp when he would have walked upon the wall. He looked surprised, he was with European friends, the order could not apply to him, but the sentry was firm. He had his orders, “No Chinese,” and without a special permit he must see them carried out. It seemed cruel, and unnecessarily humiliating, but on the central ramp are still the places where the Americans, seeking some material for a barricade, fighting to save themselves from a ghastly death, tore out the bricks from the side of the great wall. Other nations beside Britain, write in their actions, if not on their walls: “Lest We Forget!” The lower-class Chinese probably do not mind the prohibition. It is considered bad manners for a Chinaman to walk upon the wall, because he thereby overlooks the private houses below, but in these days of the New Republic possibly good manners are not so much considered as formerly, and since the Chinese have never been allowed upon the wall they probably do not realise that thirteen miles of it are free to them, if they care to go there. Some few I know do, because I have met there men gathering the dried vegetation for fuel, and I have seen one or two beggars, long-haired, filthy men in the frowsiest of rags, but the first have probably got permission from the soldiers, and the latter, seeing foreigners there, have most likely been tempted by the hope of what to them is a lavish dole, and, finding no harm happen, have come again. I may be wrong, of course, but I hardly think death can have much terror for the Chinese beggar, life must hold so very little for him. Those who, having dared their own portion of the wall with impunity, find the foreign mile still a forbidden place to them, probably put it in the same category as the Forbidden City, and never realise that it is the outlander, the outer barbarian, and not their own Government that shuts them off.

But the holding of that wall by an armed force, that dominates both the Chinese and the Tartar Cities, seems to me the very greatest thing in the way of insults. Some day when the Chinese are a united nation, powerful as they ought to be, they will awake to that insult, and the first thing they will do will be to clear their wall from foreign interference. Meanwhile, as I sit in a courtyard of a temple of the Western Hills, drinking in the sparkling air of September, looking at the lovely blue sky peeping through the dark green branches of the temple pines, as I sit and write this book, I think gratefully of that loose-limbed, lissom, athletic, young American soldier who, with rifle across his shoulder, is doing sentry-go upon the wall. The German is there too, the stiff, well-drilled, military German, but my heart goes out to the man who is nearer akin, and whose speech is not unlike that of the people of my own land. It seems to me I am safe here, alone among the Chinese, because of those soldiers. There are those who will say I am wrong, that the Chinese are always courteous, and that they like me because of the money I put into their pockets. And that is true enough too. I have found the very rickshaw coolie a finished, courteous gentleman in his manner towards me, and I have received many little acts of kindness which could but come from a kindly heart, with no thought of profit behind it; but still, deep down at the bottom of my heart, I know that the Chinese, more than any man on earth perhaps, respects power, and the Legation Quarter, and the holding of that wall, are an outward manifestation of power that reaches far and keeps me safe here in my mountain temple. The gods here by my side are dead, who fears or respects the gods, Spanish chestnuts are stored beside their altars, but the foreign soldiers on the wall are a fact there is no getting over. It impresses those in authority, and the fiat goes forth, permeating through all classes, “The foreigner is not to be touched under any circumstances whatever.”

On this wall come the foreign community to exercise and promenade in the cool of the evening in summer, or to enjoy the sunshine at midday in winter, and here all the soldiers and sailors of the various nationalities foregather. There is no other place in all Peking where one can walk with comfort, for the Chinese as a nation, have no idea of the joy of exercise. They have put it out of the power of their women to move save with difficulty, and that a man should take any pleasure in violent exercise seems to them absurd. To walk when he can ride in a rickshaw, or mount a donkey, would argue something wrong in his mental outlook, so it happens that, in all the great city, there are only the streets of the Legation Quarter and the wall where walking exercise can be indulged in. The streets of the Quarter are the streets of an uninteresting, commonplace town, but the wall overlooking the two cities is quite another matter. Here the part of the foreign community that does not ride takes its exercise, and foregathers with its kind.

The foreign quarter is not always thinking of the dangers it is guarding against. That it thinks also a great deal of its amusement, goes without saying. I have observed that this is a special characteristic of the Briton abroad. At home the middle-class man—or woman—is chary of pleasure, taking it as if it were something he had hardly a right to; but abroad he seizes eagerly the smallest opportunity for amusing himself, demanding amusement as something that hardly compensates him for his exile from his native land. So it has come that I, a looker-on, with less strong bonds than those from the Old Country binding me to my father's land, fancy that these exiles have in the end a far better time than the men of the same class who stay at home. I am apt to have no pity for them whatever.

One thing is certain, people keep horses here in Peking who could not dream of such a luxury in England. True, they are only ponies fourteen hands high, but a great deal of fun can be got out of pony racing. And racing-stables are a feature of the Quarter. Not that they are in the Quarter. On the plain, about five miles to the west of the city, lies the little race-course, and dotted about within easy distance of this excellent training-ground are the various training-stables for the ponies. The China pony comes from Mongolia, where close watch and ward is kept over him, and neither mares nor stallions are exported.

“If I could only get hold of a mare,” sighs the young racing man, but he sighs in vain. Meanwhile he can indulge in the sport of kings cheaply.

“I've joined another fellow in a racing-stable,” said a man to me, soon after my arrival in Peking, and I looked upon him with something of the awe and respect one gives to great wealth. I had not thought he was so well off. He saw my mistake and laughed.

“The preliminary expenses are only thirty pounds,” he went on, “and I don't intend they shall be very heavy. We can have good sport at a moderate cost.” Of course moderate cost is an elastic term, depending on the purse of the speaker, but in this case I think it meant that men of very ordinary means, poor exiles who would live in a six-roomed flat with a couple of maidservants in England, might have a good time without straining those means unduly.

A race-meeting in Peking has peculiarities all its own. Of course it is only the men from the West who would think of a race-meeting. The Chinese, except at the theatre, do not amuse themselves in crowds.

The Spring Meeting took place early in May, and the description of it should come a little later in my book, but it seems to fall naturally into the story of the doings of the Legation Quarter. Arrangements were made with the French railway running to Hankow to stop close to the course, and put the race-going crowd down there. There was no other means of getting there, except by riding; for driving in a country where every inch of ground, save a narrow and rough track, is given over to the needs of agriculture, is out of the question. That spring race-meeting the day was ideal. There was the blue sky overhead, the brilliant sunshine, a gentle breeze to temper it, the young kaoliang was springing, lush and green, in the fields, and the ash-trees that shelter the race-course were one delicate tender green. A delicious day. Could the heart of man desire more? Apparently the foreign residents of Peking did not desire more, for they turned out, men, women, and children. And then I saw what a handful of people are these foreigners who live in the capital of China and endeavour to direct her destinies, for save and except the missionary element, most of the other foreigners were there, from his Britannic Majesty's representative to the last little boy who had joined a hong as junior clerk at a hundred dollars a month, and felt that the cares of Empire were on his shoulders. They were mostly British, of course, the foreign trade of China—long may it be so—is mostly in British hands; and there were representatives of every other great nation, the Ministers of France, Germany, Russia, of Italy, Austria, Spain, Belgium, Holland, and Japan, everyone but America, for America was busy recognising the Chinese Republic, and the other nations were smiling, and wondering why the nation that prides itself on being the champion of freedom for the people, was being the first to recognise what is, virtually, a despotic rule.

The little course, a mile round, is marked out with leafy ash-trees, the grand-stand was charming with lilac bloom purple and white, and banksia roses, fragrant as tender memories. It was shaded by p'engs—mats—raised high on scaffolding, so that pleasant shade might not interfere with the cool breeze, and here were the women of the community, the women of well-to-do people, gay in dainty toilets from London and Paris; the men were in light summer suits, helmets and straw hats, for summer was almost upon us. Tiffin, the luncheon of the East, was set in the rooms behind, decorated with miniature flags of all nations, made in Japan, and wreathed with artificial flowers, though there was a wealth of natural blossom around the stand outside. There is a steward's room and the weighing-room in one tiny building with a curved roof of artistic Chinese design, and all the ponies are walked about and saddled and mounted where every interested spectator can see them. And every spectator on that sunny May day was interested, for the horses, the sturdy Chinese ponies, were, and always are, owned and ridden by the men of the company, men whom everybody knows intimately. For these Peking race-meetings are only amateur, and though, occasionally, a special pony may change hands at two thousand dollars—two hundred pounds—the majority are bought and sold under two hundred dollars—twenty pounds—and yet their owners have much joy and pride in them.

Surely it is unique, a race-meeting where all the civilised nations of the earth meet and fraternise in simple, friendly fashion, taking a common pleasure in small things.

“They're off!” Mostly the exclamation was in English, but a Russian-owned horse, ridden by a Cossack rider, won one race, and was led proudly up to the weighing-room by a fair lady of his own people, and was cordially applauded, for the winner was always applauded, no matter what his nationality.

The horses, coming out to parade, were each led by their own mafoo, who managed to look horsey in spite of a shaven head, long queue, and pronounced Chinese features. Up and down they led the ponies, up and down, and when at last the precious charges must be resigned, a score of them squatted down just where they could get the best view of the race, and doubtless each man put up a little prayer to the god he most affected, that the pony that carried his money might come in first.

When we were not watching the saddling, or the parade, or the race, or the weighing-in, we were listening to a Chinese band, Sir Robert Bredon's band, with a Chinese conductor, playing selections from all the modern Western music. It might have been—where in the world might it not have been? Nowhere but in Peking in the heart of China surely, for there, just beyond the limit of the course, were long strings of camels bound for coal to the Western Hills, marching steadily, solemnly, tirelessly, as they marched in the days of Marco Polo, and a thousand years before the days of Marco Polo, and all round the course, crowding every point of vantage were a large concourse of Chinese, people of the working and middle classes, clad mostly in blue, the women with bound feet from the farms near by, the men and the children very likely from further afield, but all unchanging as the camels themselves, eagerly watching the foreigners' sports. They are not allowed to come into the enclosure, every mafoo and attendant wears a special badge, and even Chinese of the better class may come only by special invitation of some member. These interested folk, who have no friends among the foreigners may not even go into the enclosure, where the “Tommies” and bluejackets, men from England and America, France, Japan, and all the countries of the earth crowded in the gay sunshine making high holiday. Nevertheless the Orientals surrounded the course. They got upon the mounds of earth that are at the back and looked from that vantage-point not only at the races but at the foreign devils at their tiffin and afternoon tea. Their own refreshment was provided by hawkers selling cakes and sweetmeats, just outside the forbidden ground, and Peking carts and donkeys waited round to take them back to their homes. There were even beggars there, beggars with long, unkempt hair, wrapped in a single garment of sackcloth, ragged, unwashed, unkempt, the typical beggars of China, for no one knows better than they when money is being lightly handled, and as the bright sunny day, the gorgeous spring day of Northern China drew slowly to a close doubtless even they, whom every man's hand was against, gathered in a few stray cash. I hope they did. Such a very little makes so much difference in China.

The sun sank slowly to the west in the translucent sky, the ponies in the saddling paddock were walked slowly up and down in the long shadows of the ash-trees, and the country was beautiful with the soft regret of the dying day as we walked back through the fields of kaoliang to the railway station, we, the handful of people who represented the power and majesty of the Western world. The mighty walls of an older civilisation frowned down upon the train—this thing of yesterday—the last rays of the setting sun lighted up all the glory of the red and gold of the Chien Men watch-tower and we were in the Legation Quarter once more, with armed sentries at the gates, and the American soldier upon the wall sounding the bugle call for the changing guard.

I come from a country where every little township considers a race-course as necessary as a cemetery. I have been to many many race-meetings, but this one in Peking, where the men of the land are so barred out that no one of Chinese descent may belong to the Club or even ride a race, stands out as unique. It has a place in my mind by itself. It was so expressive of the attitude of the Powers who watch over China. Peking, the Peking of the Legations had been amusing herself. The National Assembly was in an uproar, the Premier was openly accused of murder, the Loan was in anything but a satisfactory state, everyone feared that the North and the South would be at each other's throats before the month was out, the air was full of rumours of wars, but the English-speaking community love racing, the other nations, from their Ministers downwards, had fallen into line, and Peking, foreign Peking, did itself well.

And I wondered, I wondered much what the Chinese thought of it all. It is very, very difficult, so men tell me who have lived in China long, and speak the language well, to get at the bottom of the Chinese mind, to know what they really do think of us. The Chinese gentleman is so courteous that as far as possible he always expresses the opinion he thinks you would like to hear, and the Chinese woman, even if she be of the better classes, with very few exceptions is unlearned and ignorant as a child, indeed she is worse than a child of the Western nations, for the child is at least allowed to ask questions and learn, while all her charm is supposed to depend upon her subservience and her ignorance. As I stood on the race-course that day, and many a time as I sat in the lounge of the Wagons Lits Hotel—the European hotel of the Legation Quarter—where all tourists visiting Peking come, where the nations of the world foregather, and East meets West as never before perhaps in the world's history have they met, I have wondered very much indeed what the East, the portly middle-aged Chinaman with flowing silken robes and long queue thinks of us and our manners and customs. He was accompanied perhaps by a friend, or perhaps by a lady in high collar and trousers with a little son, the crown of the child's head shaven, and the remaining hair done in a halo of little plaits tied up with string, yellow, red, or blue, and he watched gravely either the dancing, or the conversation, or the conjurer, or whatever other amusement the “Wagons Lits” had for the time being set up. Again and again have I watched him, but I could never even make a guess at what he thought. Probably it was anything but complimentary.

"The men dressed for dinner,” said a Chinese once, describing an evening he had spent among foreigners; “then the order was given and the women stripped,” that is took off their wraps when the music began, only everything is “ordered” in China, “and each man seized a woman in his arms. He pushed her forward, he pulled her back,” graphic illustrations were given, “he whirled round and round and she had no will of her own. And it was all done to horrible music.”

Everything is in the point of view, and that is how, at least one Chinese gentleman saw a waltz. I used to wonder what he said of the musical comedy that from time to time is presented by a wandering company in the dining-room of the Wagons Lits Hotel. They displayed upon a tiny crowded stage, for the edification of Chinese and foreigners alike, for the room was crowded with Chinese both of the old and of the new order, such a picture of morals as Europeans take as a matter of course. We know well enough that such scenes as are depicted in “The Girl in the Taxi” are merely the figments of an exuberant imagination, and are not the daily habits of any class either in London or Paris. But what do the Chinese think? All things are necessary and good, I suppose, but some are difficult to explain. Thirteen years ago the Boxer tragedy, now the musical comedy full of indecencies scarcely veiled.

Truth to tell, it was a very interesting thing for a new-comer like me to sit in that hotel watching the people, and listening to the various opinions so freely given by all and sundry. From all parts of the world people come there, tourists, soldiers, sailors, business men, philanthropists'—men who were working for the good of China, and men who were ready to exploit her. And then the opinions as to the safety of the Europeans in China that were expressed! Here, in the security of the Legation Quarter, I collected those opinions as I wanted to go into the interior, and I was by no means anxious to risk my life.

To arrive at any decision was very difficult. In the Treaty Ports there may be some unanimity, but once outside it seemed that every man had his own particular opinion of China and the Chinese, and all these opinions differed widely.

“Safe,” said a man who had fought through the Boxer trouble; “safer far than London. They had to pay then, and they won't forget, you can take your oath of that.”

“Like living on a volcano,” said another. “No, I shall never forget the Boxer trouble. That's the kind of thing that is graved on your mind with hot irons. Do it again? Of course they'll do it again. A docile people, I grant you, but they're very fiends when they're aroused. They're emotional, you know, the French of the Far East, and when they let themselves go———” He paused, and I realised that he had seen them let themselves go, and no words could describe the horror of it. “Would I let my wife and children live in one of the hu t'ungs of Peking? Would I? How would they get away when the trouble commenced?”

The chances are they couldn't get away. The hu t'ungs of Peking are narrow alley-ways running out from the main thoroughfares, and the houses there are built, Chinese fashion, round courtyards and behind blank walls, hidden away in a nest of other buildings, and the difficulty of getting out and back to the armed Legation Quarter, when a mob were out bent on killing, would be enormous.

“A Debt Commission spells another anti-foreign outbreak, and we're within an ace of a Debt Commission,” said another man thoughtfully; “and if there is a row and things look like going against us, I keep one cartridge in my revolver for myself.” It does not seem much when I write it down, such things have I heard carelessly said many a time before, but when I, a foreigner and a solitary woman, was contemplating a trip up-country, they had a somewhat sinister sound.

On the other hand again and again have I heard men scout all idea of danger, men who have been up and down the country for years. And yet but yesterday, the day before I write these words, a man looked at his pretty young wife, she was sweetly pretty, and vowed vehemently, “I would not leave my wife and child alone for a night in our house just outside the Quarter for anything on earth. If anything did happen—and it might———” and he dropped his voice. There are some things that will not bear thinking about, and he had seen the looting of Nanking and the unfortunates who had died when they took the Woosung Forts. “We went to look after the wounded,” said he, “and there weren't any wounded. The savage Northern soldiery had seen to that.” And those whom they mutilated were their own people! What would they do to a foreigner in the event of an anti-foreign outbreak?

“Are you afraid?” I asked a man who certainly lived far enough away in the city. He looked at me curiously, as if he were going to say there was nothing to be afraid of, and then he changed his mind.

“Perhaps I am when I think of it,” said he; “but then you see, I don't think of it.”

And that is the average attitude, the necessary attitude, because no man can perpetually brood over the dangers that might assail him. Certain precautions he takes to safeguard himself, here are the nations armed to the teeth in the heart of a friendly country, and for the rest Quien sabe?

And I talked with all men, and while I was making preparations to go into the interior, had the good-fortune to see a quaint and curious pageant that took me back to Biblical days and made me remember how Vashti the Queen was cast down, and the beautiful Esther found favour in the sight of her lord, and how another tragic Hebrew Queen, going down to posterity with a name unjustly smirched and soiled, had once painted her face and tired her head, and looking out of the window had defied to the death her unfaithful servant. “Had Zimri peace who slew his master?”

CHAPTER V—THE FUNERAL OF AN EMPRESS

A good republican—The restricted Empire of the Manchus—Condign punishment—Babylon—An Adventurous Chinaman—The entrance to the Forbidden City—The courtyards of Babylon—A discordant and jarring note—Choirs of priests—A living Buddha—“The Swanee River”—The last note in bathos—Palace eunuchs—Out of hand—Afternoon tea—The funeral procession—The imperial bier—Quaint and strange and Eastern.

The Dowager-Empress of China, the unloved wife and widow of the late Emperor, died, so they gave out to the world, on the 22nd February, 1913, the day I arrived in China. As Empress, just one of the women of the Court chosen to please the ruler and to bear him children, his consort in China never seems to have had any particular standing. This Empress was overshadowed by her aunt, the great Dowager-Empress whom all the world knew, but once the Emperor was dead, as one of the guardians of the baby Emperor she came into a certain amount of power, for the position of Dowager-Empress seems to be an official one as, since her death, another woman who has never been wife to an Emperor has been appointed to the post.

The power has gone from the Manchus, but China is wedded to her past, nothing passes, so even the Chinese Republic, the men who barely a year before had ousted the Empress from her high estate, united in doing her honour at her obsequies.

“She was the best republican of us all,” said a Chinese gentleman, learned in the lore and civilisation of the West, “for she freely gave up her position that China might be free.”

It was a pretty way of putting it, but to me it seems doubtful whether anyone in over-civilised China trammelled with many conventions, is free, and it is hardly likely that a woman bred to think she had attained the most important position in the world that can fall to a woman's lot, would give it up freely for the good of a people she knew absolutely nothing about. All the Manchus rule over now are the courtyards and palaces of the Forbidden City, and there they are supreme. It is whispered that only a week before the day of which I write, a man was there beaten to death for having stolen something belonging to the dead Empress. So much for the love of the Manchus for freedom and enlightenment. It carries one back to the Middle Ages—further, to Babylon.

“They slew there mercilessly, and they also feasted—so did the representatives of the dead Empress hold high festival in her honour.

“The King made a feast unto all the people that were present in Shushan the palace, both unto great and small, seven days, in the Court in the garden of the King's palace.

“Where were white, green, and blue hangings fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble, the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white, and black marble.

"And they gave them drink in vessels of gold... and royal wine in abundance, according to the state of the King.”

So Ahasuerus the King entertained his people of Babylon, when Vashti the Queen fell, and of Babylon only could I think when, first I entered the Forbidden City.

Standing on the walls of Peking, a city of the plain, you look down upon twelve square miles of grey-tiled roofs, the roofs of one-storied houses hidden in the summertime by a forest of trees, but in the heart of the city are high buildings that stand out not only by reason of their height but because the roofs of golden-brown tiles, imperial yellow, gleam and glow in the sunlight. This is the Forbidden City where has dwelt for hundreds of years the Emperor of China, often he must have been the only man in it, and always it was closed to all save the immediate following of the Son of Heaven.

I never realised till I came to Peking that this forbidden ground was just as much an object of curiosity to the Chinese as it would have been to any European nation.

“I went in once,” said a Chinese gentleman to me, “when I was a young man.” He was only forty then.

“Were you invited?”

“No, no. I went secretly. I wanted to see what it was like.”

“But how?”

“I got the dress of a eunuch and I slipped in early one morning, and then, when I got in, I hardly dared move or breathe for fear someone should find me out. Then when no one took any notice of me I walked about and saw everything I could, but the last hour was the worst, I was terrified at the thought that I might not be able to get out.”

“And if you had been caught?”

He looked grave even then at the remembrance of that bygone desperate adventure.

“Oh death, certainly.”

“Death?”

“Yes, a long and lingering death,” and the thought of what he had escaped twenty years ago, was on his face.

I looked at him with interest, a tall stout Chinaman with his hair cut short in the modern fashion, a long grey robe of silk reaching to his feet, and a little short black sleeveless jacket over it. He did not look, pleasant as he was, as if he would ever have dared anything, but then I have never thought of any Chinaman as likely to risk his life without hope of gain, and to risk it for mere curiosity as a man of my own people might have done! It was throwing a new light on the Chinese. I rather admired him and then I found he was Eastern after all.

We talked of Yuan Shih K'ai, and he, being of the opposition party, expressed his opinion freely, and, considering all things, very boldly about him.

“He has eighteen wives,” said he shaking his head as if this was the unpardonable sin in a man who desired to imitate the manners and customs of the West.

I repeated this to a friend, and he burst out laughing. “Why the old sinner,” said he, “what's he throwing stones for? He's got seventeen and a half himself!” So it seems it will be some time before forbidden cities on a small scale will be out of fashion in China.

And still, in these days of the Republic, the Forbidden City of the Manchus dominates Peking.

It was thrown open for three days to all who could produce a black paper chrysanthemum with five leaves, red, yellow, blue, black, and white, fastened to a tab of white paper with a mourning edge and an inscription in Chinese characters. The foreigners had theirs from their Legations, and the Chinese from their guilds. And those Chinese—there are many of them—who are so unlucky as to belong to no guild, Chinese of the humbler sort, were shut out, and for them there was erected on the great marble bridge in front of the southern entrance, a pavilion of gorgeous orange silk enclosing an altar with offerings that stood before a picture of the dead Empress, so that all might pay their respects.

I pinned my badge to the front of my fur coat, for it was keen and cold in spite of the brilliant sunshine, and went off to the wrong entrance, the eastern gate, where only princes and notables were admitted. I thought it strange there should be no sign of a foreigner, but foreigners in Peking can be but as one in a hundred or less, so undismayed, I walked straight up to the gate, and immediately a row of palace servants clad in their white robes of mourning, clustered before the sacred place. They talked and explained vehemently, and with perfect courtesy, but they were very agitated, and though I could not understand one word they said, one thing was certain, admitted I could not be there. So I turned to the southern gate and there it seemed all Peking was streaming. It was like China that we might not go in the direct way.

There is a great paved way through the Imperial City alongside a canal that runs between marble-lined banks, but on the principal bridge that crosses it was erected the orange silk pavilion for the poorer classes, and we, the wearers of the black chrysanthemum, hundreds and thousands and ten thousands of us, had to turn off to the right and go along by the tall, pinkish red walls till we came to the great archways in the walls, five great archways filled in with doors studded with great brazen knobs. Usually they were fast shut, but they were open to-day, guarded by soldiers in full-marching order, soldiers of the New Republic in modern khaki looking out of the picture, and there streamed into the tunnellike entrance as curious a crowd as ever I set eyes upon. All must walk, old and young, great and lowly, representatives of the mighty nations of the world and tottering Chinese ladies swaying like “lilies in the wind” upon their maimed feet, only one man, a Mongol Prince, an Incarnation of a Buddha, a living Buddha, was borne in in a sedan chair. But every other mortal had to walk. The tunnels must always be gloomy, and, even on that cold day, they struck chill after the brilliant sunlight, and they are long, for the walls, just here, are about ninety feet through, so might the entrances have been in the palace of Ahasuerus the King. The courtyard we first entered had a causeway running right across it of great hewn stones, hewn and laid by slave labour, when all men bowed before the Son of Heaven, hundreds of years ago. They are worn in many places now, worn by the passing of many feet, and still more worn are the grey Chinese bricks that pave the courtyard on either side. It is a great courtyard of splendid proportions. In front of us frowned more high walls of pinkish red, topped by the buildings that can be seen all over Peking, temples or halls of audience with golden-brown tiled roofs that gleamed in the sunlight, and on either side were low buildings with fronts of lattice-work rather fallen into disrepair. They might have been used as guard-houses or, more probably, were the quarters of the six thousand or so of eunuchs that the dignity of the ruler required to attend upon him. There were a few trees, leafless then in March, but there was nothing to spoil the dignity and repose of every line. A great mind surely conceived this entrance, and great must have been the minds that kept it so severely simple. If it be the heart of a nation then do I understand. The people who streamed along the causeway, who roamed over the worn brick pavement, had, as a rule, delicate, finely formed hands though they were but humble craftsmen. If the hands of the poorest be so fine, is it any wonder that the picked men of such a people, their very heart, conceived such a mighty pile? There were more, longer and gloomier tunnels, admitting to a still greater courtyard, a courtyard that must be at least a quarter of a mile across, with the same causeway of worn stones that cry out the tale of the sufferings of the forgotten slaves, who hewed them and dragged them into place, the same grey pavement of bricks, the same tall smooth red walls, crowned over the gateway with temples, rising one story after another till the tiled roof cuts the sky. And through a third set of tunnels we came into a third courtyard, the courtyard where the obsequies were being held. The third courtyard was spacious as Trafalgar Square, and round three sides was a wide raised platform of stone reached by broad and easy ramps, and all across it ran a canal held in by marble banks, crossed by graceful bridges, and every one of the uprights, made of white marble, was crowned by a figure that I took for the representation of a flame; but those, who know, tell me it is meant to represent a cloud, and is part of the dragon symbolism. When marble is the medium by which so light a thing as a cloud is represented it must be very finely done indeed, when one outside the national thought, such as I, sees in that representation a flame. Two colossal bronze monsters with grinning countenances and curly manes, conventional lions, mounted on dragon-carved pedestals, stand before the entrance to the fourth temple or hall of audience, and here was what the crowd had come to see, the lighthearted, cheerful, merry crowd, that were making high holiday, here was the altar to the dead.

Overhead were the tiled roofs, and of all the colours of the rainbow surely none could have been chosen better than the golden brown of those tiles to harmonise with the clear blue of the glorious sky above it, no line to cut it could have been so appropriate as the gentle sweep of the curve of a Chinese roof. There was a little grass growing on the roofs, sere and withered, but a faint breeze just stirred its tops, and it toned with the prevailing golden brown in one glorious beauty. Where else in the world could one get such an effect? Only in Australia have I seen such a sky, and there it was never wedded to such a glow of colour as that it looks down upon in Peking. The men who built this palace in a bygone age, built broadly, truly, for all time.

And then, it was surely as if some envious spirit had entered in and marred all this loveliness—no, that would be impossible, but struck a discordant and jarring note that should perhaps emphasise in our minds the beauty that is eternal—for all the front of that temple, which as far as I could see was pinkish red, with under the eaves that beautiful dark blue, light blue, and green, that the Chinese know so well how to mingle, was covered with the most garish, commonplace decorations, made for the most part of paper, red, violent Reckitt's blue, yellow, and white. From every point of vantage ran strings of flags, cheap common little flags of all nations, bits of string were tied to the marble clouds, and they fluttered from them, and the great wonderful bronze lions contrived to look coy in frills that would not have disgraced a Yorkshire ham. The altar on the northern platform was hidden behind a trellis-work of gaily coloured paper, and there were offerings upon it of fruit and cakes in great profusion, all set out before a portrait of the late Empress. On either side were two choirs of priests, Buddhists and Taoists in gorgeous robes of red and orange. What faith the dead Empress held I do not know, but the average Chinese, while he is the prince of materialists, believing nothing he cannot see and explain, has also a keen eye to the main chance, and on his death-bed is apt to summon priests of all faiths so as to let no chance of a comfortable future slip; but possibly it was more from motives of policy than from any idea of aiding the dead woman that these representatives of the two great faiths of China were summoned. On the rights behind a trellis-work of bright paper, one choir sat in a circle, beat gongs, struck their bells and intoned; and on the left, behind a like trellis-work, the other choir knelt before low desks and also solemnly intoned. Their Mongolian faces were very impassive, they looked neither to the right nor the left, but kept time to the ceaseless beat of their leader's stick upon a globe of wood split across the middle like a gaping mouth emblematical of a fish and called mu yii—or wooden fish. What were they repeating? Prayers for the dead? Eulogies on her who had passed? Or comfort for the living? Not one of these things. Probably they were intoning Scriptures in Tibetan, an unknown tongue to them very likely, but come down to them through the ages and sanctified by thousands of ceaseless repetitions.

And the people came, passed up the steps, bowed by the direction of the usher—in European clothes—three times to the dead Empress's portrait, and the altar, were thanked by General Chang, the Military Commandant, and passed on by the brightly clad intoning priests down into the crowd in the great courtyard again. It was weird to find myself taking part in such a ceremony. Stranger still to watch the people who went up and down those steps. In all the world surely never was such an extraordinary funeral gathering. I am very sure that never shall I attend such another. There was such a mingling of the ancient and the blatantly modern. To the sound of weird, archaic, Eastern music the living Buddha, clad all in yellow, in his yellow sedan chair, borne by four bearers in dark blue with Tartar caps on their heads, made his reverence, and was followed by a band of Chinese children from some American mission school, who, with misguided zeal sang fervently at the top of their shrill childish voices “Down by the Swanee River” and “Auld Lang Syne,” and then soldiers in modern uniform of khaki or bright blue were followed by police officers in black and gold. The wrong note was struck by the “Swanee River,” the high officials dwelt upon it, for the Chinese does not look to advantage in these garbs, he looks what he is makeshift, a bad imitation, and the jarring was only relieved when the Manchu princes came in white mourning sheepskins and black Tartar caps. They may be dissolute and decadent, have all the vices that new China accuses them of, but at least they looked polished and dignified gentlemen, at their ease and in their place. It does not matter, possibly. The President once said that to petition for a monarchy was an act of fanaticism worthy of being punished by imprisonment, and so the old order must in a measure pass; even in China, the unchanging, there must come, it is a law of nature, some little change, and when I looked at the bows and arrows of the Manchu guard leaning against the wall I realised that it would be impossible to keep things as they were, however picturesque. Still khaki uniforms, if utilitarian, are ugly, and American folk-songs, under such conditions, struck the last note in bathos, or pathos. It depends on the point of view.

On the white paper tabs, attached to our black chrysanthemums, was written something about the New Republic, but it might have been the spirit of the Empress at home, so cheerful and bent on enjoyment was the crowd which thronged the courtyard. The bands played, sometimes Eastern music, strange and haunting, sometimes airs from the European operas, there were various tents erected with seats and tables, and refreshments were served, oranges, and ginger, and tea, and cakes of all kinds, both in the tents and at little altar-like stands dotted about the courtyard even at the very foot of the pedestals of the great conventional lions. And the people walked round looking at everything, peeping through every crevice in the hopes of seeing some part of the palace that was not open to them, chatting, laughing, greeting each other as they would have done at a garden-party in Europe. There were all sorts of people, dressed in all sorts of fashions. New China looked at best common-plage and ordinary in European clothes; old China was dignified in a queue, silken jacket and brocaded petticoat, generally of a lighter colour; Manchu ladies wore high head-dresses and brilliant silken coats, blue or pink, lavender or grey, and Chinese ladies tottered along on tiny, bound feet that reminded me of the hoofs of a deer, and the most fashionable, unmarried girls wore short coats with high collars covering their chins, and tight-fitting trousers, often of gaily coloured silk, while the older women added skirts, and the poorer classes just wore a long coat of cotton, generally blue, with trousers tightly girt in at the ankles, and their maimed feet in tiny little embroidered shoes. European dress the Chinese woman very seldom affects yet, and their jet black hair, plastered together with some sort of substance that makes it smooth and shiny, is never covered, but flowers and jewelled pins are stuck in it. Occasionally—I did on this day—you will see a woman with a black embroidered band round the front of her head, but this, I think, denotes that she is of the Roman Catholic faith, for the Roman Catholics have been in China far longer than any other Christian sect, and they invented this head-dress for the Chinese woman who for ages has been accustomed to wear none, because of the Pauline injunction, that it was a shame for a woman to appear in a church with her head uncovered. Old China did not approve of a woman going about much at all, and here at this funeral I heard many old China hands remarking how strange it was to see so many women mingling with the throng. It marked the change; but such a very short time back, such a thing would have been impossible.

There were numbers of palace eunuchs too—keepers of the women who, apparently, may now show their faces to all men, and they were clad all in the mourning white, with here and there one, for some reason or other I cannot fathom, in black. The demand for eunuchs was great when the Emperor dwelt, the one man, in the Forbidden City surrounded by his women, and they say that very often the number employed rose to ten thousand. Constantly, as some in the ranks grew old, fell sick, or died, they had to be replaced, and, so conservative is China, the recruits were generally drawn from certain villages whose business it was to supply the palace eunuchs. Often, of course, the operation was performed in their infancy, but often, very often, a man was allowed to grow up, marry, and have children, before he was made ready for the palace.

“Impossible,” I said, “he would not consent then. Never.” And my informant laughed pitifully. “Ah,” said she, “you don't know the struggle in China. Anything for a livelihood.”

Some of the eunuchs wanted their photographs taken, and I was willing enough if they would only give me room. I wanted one in white, but they desired one in black, either because he was the most important or the least important, I know not which, and they sat him on a stone that had been a seat perhaps when Kublai Khan built the palace; and the keeper of the women, the representative of the old cruel past, that pressed men and women alike into the service of the great, looked in my camera sheepish as a schoolboy kissed in public by his maiden aunt.

There were coolies, too, in the ordinary blue cotton busy about the work that the entertaining of such a multitude necessarily entails, and everyone looked cheerful and happy, as, after all, why should they not, for death is the common lot, and must come to all of us, and they had seen and heard of the dead Empress about as much as the dweller in Chicago had. They were merely taking what she, or her representatives, gave with frank goodwill, and enjoying themselves accordingly.

Against the walls they kept putting up long scrolls covered with Chinese characters, sentences in praise of the virtues of the Empress, and sent, as we would send funeral wreaths, to honour the dead, and presently a wind arose and tore at them and they fluttered out from the walls like long streamers, and as the wind grew wilder, some were tom down altogether. But that was on the afternoon of the second day, when worse things happened. I went down to the Forbidden City after tiffin, and behold, outside the great gates, looking up longingly and murmuring a little, was a great crowd that grew momentarily greater. The doors, studded with brazen nails, were fast closed, and little parties of soldiers with their knapsacks upon their backs were evidently telling the crowd to keep back, and very probably, since it was China, the reason why they should keep back. The reason was, of course, lost upon me, I only knew that, before I realised what was happening, I was in the centre of a crushing crowd that was gradually growing more unmanageable. A Chinese crowd is wonderfully good-natured, far better-tempered than a European crowd of a like size would be, but when a crowd grows great, it is hardly responsible for its actions. Besides, a Chinese crowd has certain little unpleasant habits. The men picked up the little children, for the tiniest tots came to this great festival, and held them on their shoulders, but they coughed, and hawked, and spit, and wiped their noses in the primitive way Adam probably did before he thought of using a fig-leaf as a pocket handkerchief, and at last I felt that the only thing to be done was to edge my way to the fringe of the press, because, even if the doors were opened, it would have seemed like taking my life in my hands to go into one of those tunnels with their uneven pavements in such a crush. Once down it would be hopeless to think of getting up again.

After a time, however, they did open the doors, and the people surged in. When all was clear I followed, and once inside heard how the people in the great courtyard, in spite of police and soldiers, had swarmed up and threatened by their rush, the good-natured, purposeless rush of a crowd, to carry away offerings, altar, choirs and decorations, and, very naturally, those in authority had closed the doors against all new-comers until the people had been got well in hand again. It had taken some time. Before the altar was a regular scrimmage, and after the crowd had passed it left behind it, shoes, and caps, and portions of its clothing which were thrown back into the courtyard to be gathered up by those who could recognise their own property. By the time I arrived things were settling down. We had to wait in the second courtyard, and the women, Chinese ladies with their little aching feet, and Manchus in their high head-dresses sat themselves down on the edge of the causeway, because standing on pavement is wearisome, and there waited patiently till the doors were opened, and inside everything was soon going again as gaily as at an ordinary garden-party in Somerset.

“Do you like Chinese tea?” asked a Chinese lady of me in slow and stilted English. I said I did.

A Woman In China

A WOMAN IN CHINA

By Mary Gaunt

Author Of "Alone In West Africa," "The Uncounted Cost," Etc.

London: T. Werner Laurie Ltd.

1915

A WOMAN IN CHINA

CHAPTER I—ACROSS THE OLD WORLD

CHAPTER II—A CITY OF THE AGES

CHAPTER III—THE WALLS AND GATES OF BABYLON

CHAPTER IV—THE LEGATION QUARTER OF PEKING

CHAPTER V—THE FUNERAL OF AN EMPRESS